PneumoniaCheck, a device created by engineers at the Georgia Institute of Technology, may help prevent thousands of people from dying of pneumonia each year.  Pneumonia, an inflammation of the lungs, kills about 2.4 million people each year. The problem is particularly devastating in Africa, Southeast Asia and the Eastern Mediterranean, where a child dies of pneumonia every 15 seconds.

“Georgia Tech created a simple and new device to detect the lung pathogens causing pneumonia, “ said David Ku, Georgia Tech Regents’ Professor of Mechanical Engineering, Lawrence P. Huang Chair Professor for Engineering Entrepreneurship in the College of Management, and Professor of Surgery at Emory University. “It has the potential to save more lives than any other medical device.”

The device contains a plastic tube with a mouthpiece. A patient coughs into the device to fill up a balloon-like upper airway reservoir before the lung aerosols go into a filter.  Using fluid mechanics, PneumoniaCheck separates the upper airway particles of the mouth from the lower airway particles coming from the lungs.

Once the device was developed, Taylor Bronikowski and a group of Georgia Tech M.B.A. students started developing a business plan for PneumoniaCheck that starts locally and grows globally.  They used the device as a test case to develop a Triple Bottom Line company in India that could result in financial profits, environmental sustainability and social benefits, such as jobs and healthcare.

The FDA has cleared PneumoniaCheck for sale in the U.S. The device is licensed but its patent is pending.  The company will start selling PneumoniaCheck in the U.S. in January and it could hit other countries in two years, Ku said.

For more information, visit the original article at http://www.gatech.edu/newsroom/release.html?nid=63994 or the PnuemoniaCheck website at http://www.mdinnov8.com/.