Twelve members of Cornell Design by Biomedical Undergraduate Teams — a biomedical engineering project team — participated in the Biomedical Engineering Society 2024 Annual Meeting held at the Baltimore Convention Center from Oct. 23 to 26. Two Cornell DEBUT sub-teams, SteadyStride and NanoLIST, attended the event with devices developed over a two-year period.
The BMES 2024 Annual Meeting brought together nearly 5,000 biomedical engineering students, researchers and industry professionals. The agenda included industry tours, panels, research poster presentations and design competitions.
The SteadyStride sub-team presented its self-stabilizing cane for patients with Parkinson’s disease, taking first-place in the Mechanical/Electrical category at the Medtronic/BMES Student Design Competition.
The NanoLIST sub-team accepted the “Healthcare Technologies for Low-Resource Settings Prize” on Oct. 25 and delivered a five-minute presentation about its winning low-cost and rapid saliva test kit that measures lead levels in blood. NanoLIST received the award on Aug. 26.
The SteadyStride cane reduces tremors associated with Parkinson’s disease and enables easier movement. Parkinson’s disease is a brain disorder that leads to difficulties with balance and coordination as well as uncontrollable movements such as shaking.
The cane features a tuned mass damper and dome-shaped base made of a shock absorbent, rubber-like plastic and coated in chlorinated rubber with treads at the bottom. A tuned mass damper is a device that reduces vibrations with an internal spring-mass system. Instead of the entire structure wobbling, the energy that would wobble the structures causes an internal mass to move on a spring.
In SteadyStride, the tuned mass damper consists of four springs and a central aluminum block inside the cane’s shaft. The SteadyStride team designed the specific dimensions of the springs and the block to counteract the frequency of Parkinsonian tremors.
According to team lead elect Veda Kamaraju ’26, SteadyStride took inspiration from a skyscraper in Taipei, Taiwan, that mitigated earthquake effects using a tuned mass damper as well.
Angela Altamirano ’25, a senior consultant for Cornell DEBUT, delivered a 10-minute presentation on SteadyStride to a panel of seven judges. The judges evaluated teams on a 25-point scale based on criteria such as market potential, device potential and presentation style.
SteadyStride faced stiff competition from teams that included doctoral and medical school students, according to Altamirano.
“I think it was down to a tenth of a point between first and third place,” Altamirano said. “And I believe we were definitely the underdogs in our category.”
As a result, winning the Mechanical/Electrical category surprised the team.
“When we finally got the announcement, we were all stunned — there was really not even an immediate sense of joy,” said project manager Andrew D’Onofrio ’26.
Cornell DEBUT’s second project, NanoLIST, quantifies blood lead levels through a chemical reaction. The process uses gold nanoparticles — in the presence of lead, the gold nanoparticles clump together, leading to a color change.
NanoLIST users simply spit into a vial, insert another container, press a button and shake the vial for 30 seconds. According to Cornell DEBUT, elevated lead levels in blood affects an estimated 815 million children. While current blood test kits cost $17 on average, NanoLIST costs less than 24 cents.
“This kind of diagnostic device would be distributed in low income communities,” D’Onofrio said. “[NanoLIST] would be an early stage test for people who are trying to see whether or not they do need to get treatment for lead poisoning.”
During SteadyStride’s development, Cornell DEBUT received approval from the Institutional Review Board to test its product on people with Parkinson’s disease. They collected data at the State University of New York at Cortland’s Biomechanics Lab.
“[The people with Parkinson’s in the trial] informed us that they would want something that’s a bit more discrete compared to a walker,” Kamaraju said. “That emotional aspect was also very, very important to us.”
As a winning team at the Medtronic/BMES Student Design Competition, Cornell DEBUT had the opportunity to discuss SteadyStride’s commercialization with a Medtronic representative, a chance that sub-team members found rewarding.
“People understand that there is a market. They understand that our product is novel, and they see a future for it. That was definitely really rewarding,” said research and development analyst Emma Weiss ’26.
Beyond Cornell DEBUT’s marketing potential and prizes earned, the impacts of its work excite team members.
“We definitely went into [the BMES 2024 Annual Meeting] already feeling that we won because of the community we have continued to build and are now a part of,” Altamirano said.
Lauren Hsu can be reached at [email protected].