Established in 2019, Northwestern Medical Makers makes it its mission to provide medical assistance while giving biomedical engineering students field experience.

Medical Makers is typically divided into two teams: general and competition. This year, the club added an additional competition team — one dedicated solely to new competitors. 

Last year’s competition team made the final round in the Rehabilitation Engineering and Assistive Technology Society of North America’s Student Design Challenge and plans to continue its project this year to reach more rigorous competitions.

Their project, called MILO, is an assistive arm-like stand — with a twist. 

“They added a voice command system,” said McCormick senior and Medical Makers President Julia Song. “If (patients) were like, ‘Oh I want to take a sip of water,’ the arm would move in towards their mouth.”

Song, who joined the club her sophomore year, said while most McCormick students join clubs during their freshman year, it was easy to transition into her new role as president after acting as a project manager for a year.

Since MILO was intended to aid those suffering from quadriplegia, Song said the voice command feature was critical because patients mainly have control over their head and neck regions.

The other competition team is also working to aid paraplegic and quadriplegic patients with a slide board, a device they can rest on and use to be pushed upward to reach surfaces like a bed or chair without using any core strength.

The projects are hyper-specific to serve particular needs. All Medical Makers projects come from proposals by nurses at the Shirley Ryan AbilityLab, a nonprofit hospital located in downtown Chicago.

Coming up on her eight-year anniversary at Shirley Ryan in December, nurse Elianna Rivkin knew she wanted to be a part of the lab even before starting nursing school at DePaul University. A core value Rivkin said she carries throughout her work is empowering patients by helping to give them greater autonomy. 

She mentioned that because nurses spend extended amounts of time with their patients, it’s easy to identify their individual needs. 

“What I tell nurses when they’re thinking of ideas is think about those things that maybe frustrate you, because we’re constantly innovating when working with patients and always want to deliver the best care,” Rivkin said.

Rivkin said nurses are end users, meaning they use medical products in the field. According to her, patients and their families can be end users as well, meaning the products that Medical Makers create must go through rigorous testing to ensure anybody, regardless of experience, will be able to safely use them.

The development chain benefits not only patients and students but also nurses, Rivkin said. She described how nurses are “a big untapped resource,” with the Medical Makers process giving them a platform to step up and voice their ideas.

One of the latest additions to Medical Makers is the club’s collaboration with Stryker, a medical device company. The partnership started last academic year out of the company’s shared belief in giving back to the community, as well as its willingness to provide advice to undergraduate students, according to Song.

Originally intended to kickstart an entirely separate team within Medical Makers, the partnership came with unforeseen challenges. 

“There were a bunch of IP issues, so Stryker became more of a mentorship system,” Song said. “They still couldn’t give us advice on our prototypes, which was really difficult because that’s what we wanted advice on.”

Each Medical Makers project has to go through ideation and prototyping stages. While ideation is more focused on brainstorming possible solutions to the medical need in question, prototyping has to do more with creating mockups. 

Even through the challenges, the club still meets as normal. Song described the main recruitment event as a quarterly interest meeting, in which people are separated into their preferred teams. While not everyone can make these meetings, Song always makes a point to check her Medical Makers email at least once a week in order to accommodate potential members.

Weinberg freshman Nathan Lee said he is a big fan of the club’s hands-on nature.

“I think it has a good cause,” Lee said. “I can totally see myself doing that. I’m also planning to go into pre-med, so it does align with my career a pretty good amount.”

While the club mainly appeals to people planning to go into the medical field, Song said having a science-related major or career interest is not a requirement by any means.

“Every single student who has been a part of this program has demonstrated a level of professionalism, respect and dedication that is well beyond their years,” Rivkin said. “It’s really heartwarming to know that we’ve got some really thoughtful and really dedicated folks who are on their way to those leadership roles.”

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