Dartmouth Engineering Undergraduate Named Finalist in NIHF Collegiate Inventors Competition

Dartmouth engineering sciences major Victoria King '27 (Photo by Robert Anderson)

Venous thromboembolism (VTE), a condition in which blood clots form in the veins, can lead to a life-threatening pulmonary embolism if a clot breaks off and travels to the lungs. According to the American Heart Association, up to 900,000 VTE events occur each year in the United States, and thrombosis is associated with one in four deaths worldwide.

Vaskular, which is also a finalist in the Biomedical Engineering Society's Student Design Competition, is built to provide custom, individualized pneumatic compression on an as-needed basis. King says this can lead to a more comfortable, sustainable, and effective user experience. 

"Most compression systems apply a predetermined cycle," she says. "Vaskular asks what changes when the patient's physiological response becomes part of the control system."

Using optical sensors near the ankle and knee, the device monitors physiological signals associated with blood flow and tissue oxygenation, and adjusts compression pressure, duration, and sequencing in real-time. King also envisions a future version of Vaskular that could monitor and flag elevated clot risk before a pulmonary embolism occurs.

King was inspired to work on the problem of VTE prevention after witnessing her mother struggle with the condition for years before almost losing her life.

"After surgery for an unrelated issue, my mother developed a deep vein thrombosis and suffered from a series of long-term blood-clot complications," says King. More than a decade later, those complications culminated in a pulmonary embolism. Luckily, her mother survived, but watching that experience got King thinking about engineering a solution.

Kwame Owusu Ansah, assistant director of Social Entrepreneurship + Innovation at Dartmouth, serves as an advisor on the project and recalled a particular conversation with King: "She was preparing for a pitch competition, which fell the day before Mother's Day, and she told me, 'Kwame, I almost didn't have a mother to celebrate tomorrow because of an undetected blood clot that moved to her lungs. That's why I can't give up on this. I'm going to work on it until no one has to go through that again.'"

As King's advisor on the venture and strategy side, Owusu Ansah was an early cheerleader and has written in support of her national competition applications. "I've advised a lot of ambitious students," he says. "What separates Victoria is that she takes a hard hit, learns from it, and comes back with something better instead of something defended."

King began developing Vaskular with Dartmouth's Magnuson Center for Entrepreneurship which provided funding through their Social Venture Incubator and startup pitch competition. That enabled her to bring in external engineering support for detailed board layout and portions of firmware implementation based on her system architecture and specifications. 

Her gratitude also goes to a long list of additional supporters along the way, including: Magnuson Assistant Director Roy Schmidt; Venture Studio, a cohort of student founders that provided a close-knit startup community; Dartmouth alum Tracey Turner '93 who challenged her thinking on technical feasibility and go-to-market strategy; athletic trainer Mollie Przybocki who sharpened her thinking around gait asymmetry detection for identifying compensation patterns in post-surgical and injured athletes; Dartmouth men's soccer midfielder Raphael Oppong Owusu '28 who provided athlete feedback and helped shape the mobile app interface used to monitor and interact with the system; and Abdul-Kudus Alhassan '26 who taught her how to pitch the technology.

King will present Vaskular as an undergraduate finalist at the Competition on October 15th. After that, she'll travel to Orlando, Florida, to present "Vaskular: A Closed-Loop Wearable Compression Device for Venous Thromboembolism Prophylaxis" at the BMES Annual Meeting on October 23.

NIHF's CIC recognizes and rewards the innovations of college students and their advisors that have the potential of receiving patent protection. Entries are evaluated based on originality, process, level of student initiative, and potential value and usefulness to society. Finalists will present their inventions to a panel composed of the most influential inventors and invention experts in the nation—NIHF Inductees and United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) officials.

Meanwhile, voting for the People's Choice Award, a special prize of $2,000 plus a patent acceleration certificate from USPTO, is open now through October 14 at 5:00pm ET.