| Estonian Aleksei Andrejev’s project could help the medical profession and patients to understand the medical phenomenon. Phantom pain is often experienced by amputees in the limb they no longer have — in some cases on a daily basis.
There is evidence the brain re-maps after amputation and patients may feel sensations in the phantom limb when touched in other parts of their body.
Aleskei, a final year student at the University of Dundee’s department for applied computing, has developed a program that can record these sensations on a 3D model of the human body.
By using a computerised mapping technique, the sensations can be more accurately pinpointed than relying solely on the amputee's feeling of where the sensation is.
Also demonstrated was final year student Katie Went’s prototype of a computerised prescribing system that could be used in hospitals to improve the drug treatment process.
Within NHS hospitals, this process is generally handwritten and errors are made each year as a consequence of illegible or incorrect prescriptions.
Katie’s final working prototype allows doctors to create new prescriptions for hospital patients and nurses to record the actual administration of these drugs to the patients — all of which was previously done on paper.
Following a demonstration of the final prototype at Ninewells Hospital, Dundee, NHS Tayside has proposed financial support to extend the project.
Katie plans to continue start a postgraduate degree at the university after graduating. |
