Purdue, Harrison High School students team up to teach people about heart health
June 18, 2015
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Harrison High School students Abigail Hancock (left) and Emily Blanchard explain their heart educational device during a presentation at the Indiana Veterans' Home in West Lafayette. (Photo provided) |
A group of Purdue pharmacy students and faculty is working with girls from Harrison High School to promote better heart health for residents of Tippecanoe County.
Pharmacy students Brittany Oliver and Marjorie Guillermo, both members of the Academy of Student Pharmacists (ASP), a student organization at Purdue, have been teaching a group of girls from Harrison about heart disease for the past year.
The Harrison girls, starting in May 2014, constructed an educational device, which uses pumps, valves, fluids and a circuit board to simulate the pumping of blood through a human heart. The girls are interested in STEM-related careers and recognized that designing and building such a device was a good fit for their human health and engineering career interests.
"We built three versions of the device and really enjoyed figuring out how to engineer it so that you could feel a difference in pressure when the gauges were turned, and so that the connectors didn't leak," says Abigail Hancock, a junior at Harrison High School who worked on the project. Abigail's mother, Diana Hancock, is commercialization director for the Office of the Vice President for Information Technology and introduced Oliver and Guillermo to the girls.
Oliver, Guillermo and the high school students applied for and received a grant from the Office of Engagement to further develop the device and include it as part of ASP's health screenings.
"We have incorporated the high school girls into a variety of ASP's health fairs by adding the heart educational device to our usual screenings," Oliver says. "We have educated patients about the heart and the effects of high blood pressure in a way that is much more tangible and meaningful to them."
Kimberly Plake, associate professor of pharmacy practice, says, "Hypertension, or high blood pressure, is often referred to as the silent disease because the level has to get fairly high before a patient feels the effects. This device has different settings and controllable valve levels so that patients can actually feel just how difficult it can be for a heart to pump fluid through restricted pathways due to hypertension." Plake serves as advisor for ASP and has overseen the outreach program with the high school students.
The team conducts surveys with patients who use the device to determine its effectiveness as an educational tool. Oliver and Guillermo used that data to write an abstract and present at a national pharmacy poster session in San Diego. The high school team also presented at a Lafayette regional science fair, placing second, and then at the Hoosier Science and Engineering Fair, where the project received a Health and Human Services Engineering Award.
"It was a lot of fun to talk about heart education to so many people," Abigail Hancock says. "Patients all had a different idea of what high blood pressure was and where it came from."
Plake and the students are planning to develop a manuscript using the data they gathered from the patient surveys.
Guillermo says, "We are also looking to see if we can expand our sample size to get a better analysis. I do believe we have already helped some people develop a better understanding of high blood pressure, the importance of preventing the disease, and the consequences of non-adherence to medications."
Plake says, "There have been so many great outcomes from this project, including the thrill of seeing the Purdue students I mentor give back and mentor high school girls. It is also great to help patients improve their health outcomes, to witness the high school girls get excited about this project, and to create partnerships between schools so that we can improve the health of Tippecanoe County."
