Physician-innovators at Carle Illinois College of Medicine have engineered a new device to prolong the life of costly anesthesiology suctioning equipment, with the potential to produce significant cost savings for hospitals nationwide and shrink the national carbon footprint.
The innovation called SuctionSense is a smart pressure transducer system connected to a microcontroller on the anesthesia suction machine. The device sounds an alert and provides a visual cue when the suction device has been unnecessarily left in the ‘open’ position so the OR team can power down the equipment when suction isn’t being used.
CI MED students Nathan Nguyen and Sharon Chao teamed up with William Hayes, a PhD student in Columbia University’s Mechanical Engineering program, to create the device, leveraging engineering principles in solving a real-world health care challenge. The innovation won first place at the 2025 Society for Technology in Anesthesia Engineering Challenge. Experts judged SuctionSense as a valuable improvement to anesthesiology equipment, reducing wear and costly replacements that can result when suction systems are unnecessarily left on for prolonged periods of time.
“Leaving suction systems on when they’re not needed, especially for 8-12 hours overnight, leads to wear and decreased lifespan of the suction system parts, such as the vacuum pump and filters. Replacing these parts is expensive: for filters, it costs $2,500-$10,000; for pump systems, it can cost $100,000-$750,000,” Nguyen said.
SuctionSense may offer environment benefits, too. “Leaving suction systems running overnight contributes an estimated 140 million kg of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions globally each year. We estimate SuctionSense can reduce CO2 emissions by 42 million kg per year, equivalent to planting 1.7 million new trees each year,” Chao said.
The team is looking to fully develop and market their new detection and alert system, which they expect to cost about $100.
The team will partner with a hospital to test their device. The SuctionSense team is the second CI MED-led team to win the nationwide competition. In 2023, Michael Ma and Maharshi Pandya received top honors for designing a new machine-learning system to improve the assessment of patients’ recovery from anesthesia following surgery.