Portable Pulmonary Injury Diagnostic Device

Various pulmonary traumas occurring in a battlefield environment require fast and accurate diagnosis. One of the traditional techniques used by physicians for physical examination of pulmonary injuries and diseases is percussion. It is a method of tapping body parts with fingers, hands, or small instruments to evaluate the size, consistency, borders, and presence or absence of fluid/air in body organs, such as lungs, abdomen, etc. Percussion of a body part produces a sound—like playing a drum—that reflects the state of the organ under examination. Percussion has been successfully used for the diagnosis of such potentially lethal conditions for soldiers wounded in the battlefield as traumatic and tension pneumothorax (a collection of gas in the pleural space surrounding the lungs and resulting in the collapse of the lung on the affected side). A significant impact on the mortality rates could be made if pulmonary traumas could be identified rapidly. Our goal is to create a device enabling the application of the percussion diagnostic methodology to pulmonary injury detection quickly and under various conditions.