Engineering Duo Develop Breast Cancer Self-Checking Device, Win James Dyson Award 2022
They've created DotPlot -- an at-home breast health monitoring tool that can offer accurate guided self-checks for breast health, every month.
Shefali Bohra and Debra Babalola, Innovative Design Engineering graduates at Imperial College London and at the Royal College of Art have developed a cool DIY device to detect breast cancer.
PA via DotPlot
They've created DotPlot -- an at-home breast health monitoring tool that can offer accurate guided self-checks for breast health, every month.
The device uses sound waves to detect lumps within a breast. The tech works with the user first creating a custom map of their torso, based on the size and shape of their breast. Once set up, the app guides women to areas where they need to scan. The device emits a sound every time a tissue composition is scanned.
The scanned data is compared to previously recorded readings, which look for anomalies and abnormalities of any kind that are developing in the tissue. If anything suspicious is found, the user would be notified to visit a healthcare professional for a thorough investigation.
The idea behind DotPlot
The idea behind creating DotPlot came when one of the innovators behind the device, Shefali discovered a strange knot in one of her breasts. She approached a gynecologist for a clinical breast exam and was advised to monitor the knot with her fingers for a few months.
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The knot eventually disappeared, however, this gave Shefali and Debra the push to look for tools that can be used to routinely assist women in monitoring their breast health.
They actually found that no at-home solutions really existed to early-detect breast cancer, which only encouraged them to develop a solution on their own.
They surveyed women who had or hadn¡¯t had family history of breast cancer to gather key insights on how they perform self-checks. The research highlighted that even after a nurse or a doctor had told them how to perform a self-check, many didn¡¯t have confidence that they were doing it right.
Moreover, devices that helped in detecting breast cancer were all for clinical use and nothing for at-home self-checking.
The solution developed by the duo makes use of sound waves to detect lumps within a breast surrogate, which found distinct differences in readings in areas with and without lumps. For this creation, they were also recently awarded the James Dyson Award with ?5000 funding for their project.
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