UNAIR NEWS – Daily nutrition supply for patient has important roles, either critical patient or in treatment patient. The objective is to maintain the patient condition and to improve their immune system. But what happens when the patient looses their swallowing reflect? If they cannot swallow, nutrition supply will be difficult to fulfill for their body.

From that problem, a team of Universitas Airlangga (UNAIR) students consisting of Masunatul Ubudiyah (FKp ‘13), Mokhammad Dedy Batomi (FV ‘13), Mokhammad Deny Basri (FV ‘13), and Dewa Ayu Gita MS (FST ‘12) have succeeded in developing a “gastric pump” which enables to supply nutrition to the patient. The device was named “Nasogastric Pump Control”.

Explained by Masunatul Ubudiyah, the team leader of this PKM Karsa Cipta, that dysphagia is an obstruction of food swallowing from the mouth, pharynx, or esophagus, which the patient experience difficulty to swallow and sometimes with pain. This kind of complaint occurs as a symptom of other disease like stroke, or  post intestinal operation.

The findings then formulated to be a paper titled “Nasogastric Pump Control: Inovasi Injeksi Nutrisi Cair dan Obat dengan Prinsip Stability Fluid Pressure dalam Meminimalisir Bahaya Distensi Abdomen pada Pasien Disfagia (Liquid Nutrition and Drug Injection Innovation through Stability Fluid Pressure Stability Principle in Minimizing the Danger of Abdomen Distension in Dysphagia patient)”. The team was one of teams who got funding from General Directorate of Higher Education of Ministry of Research, Technology and Higher Education in Student Creativity Program 2016.

Dedy added that his team designing this using arduino uno, innovating NGT (Nasogastric Tubes) to be  sophisticated device prototype equipped with three mode choice (nutrition, observation and therapy). This design has never been developed before.

Nutrition Mode is chosen when the patient with dysphagia does not have complications, so the nutrition is injected like normal swallowing. Observation Mode is used to check and observe the patient’s stomache for diagnosis need. Therapy Mode use can be timed, because  the mode is closely related to nutrition absorption in the intestines, so this mode is specifically used to patient with dysphagia with other digestive complication such as in patient who has just had small intenstines operation.

Asked about the obstacles in its development, Ayu Gita added that since its initial prototype development process, there were many obstacles, form the component design to its programming.

“But we can solve the problems one by one with our different competence from different faculties, Faculty of Nursing (FKp), Faculty of Vocations (FV), and Faculty of Science and Technology (FST) so the time to discuss and meet to finish this was quite difficult to manage. But we always spare some time after dusk prayer until ten o’clock in the evening to develop the device,” said Gita.

Deny had great hopes to patent this design and have partnership in the future. Most importantly, it can be applied and developed widely in healthcare service centers as the prevalence of dysphagic patients in hospitals is still quite high. (*)

Author: Bambang Bes