“Rollief” was a medical product idea that I developed with a group of friends for Carnegie Mellon’s Impact-a-thon on February 12, 2018. We continued the project (conducted market research) until September 2018 but ultimately decided to sunset the project.
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In emergency relief scenarios, first-responders attempt to prevent infection by appropriately bandaging wounds. However, emergency situations often have an abundance of infected (standing) water and poor sanitation. Clearly, there is a need for an improved system that allows victims of natural disasters to easily apply a bandage that can/will keep infection at bay. Furthermore, the system should allow the victim to independently apply another bandage without returning to the first-responder. Additionally, in hospitals around the world there is a constant threat of infection. Nurses bandaging skin wounds would welcome a system that was not only more sterile, but also faster, allowing them to help more people. Rollief meets all of these challenges, a feat that no other product on the market has accomplished.
Our target market is emergency aid nonprofits and governmental agencies who are purchasing medical supplies which they will supply to first-responders. The U.S. Department of Labor estimates that an estimated 1.3 million first responders (Firefighters, Police, EMTs) were employed in 2013. We also imagine that as this product gains popularity, Rollief could also become an essential piece of bandaging equipment for low/middle-class households who would prefer to bandage a moderately serious injury at home rather than go to a doctor. An estimated 32% of all American households are low income and 42% are middle class, so this target demographic encompasses 74% of American households (93.1 million households). Moreover, 11.3% of Americans don’t have health insurance, making it unlikely that they would go to a hospital. These individuals would greatly benefit from a sterile bandage system.
Rollief’s unique benefits are that:
- It allows an individual to self-apply a bandage without touching the wound
- The bandage is entirely waterproof, so it will keep infected liquids from touching the wound
- Its “tape” facilitates healing (tegaderm)
- It is easy to cut because gauze is attached in the perpendicular direction to convention
- Tape, gauze, and antibiotic are all packaged into a single bandage roll.
- The length used is flexible and it can therefore be applied to small and large wounds.
- The bandage roll fits onto the average packing tape dispenser, which can be found in many households.
There are currently no products on the market that allow people who sustain moderate to severe wound injuries to apply bandages to injuries of differing size in a single step. For example, a victim with large wound on their leg would first need to clean the wound, then apply an antibiotic, cover the wound in gauze, and finally wrap the gauze in some kind of out bandage. More likely than not, this entire configuration is not waterproof, so the wound would not protect the user from infected water. With Rollief, the victim would simply clean their wound, then roll the bandage in circles around their leg until the wound was completely covered. The resulting dressing, which was applied in a fraction of the time, is waterproof and covers the wound in an antibiotic cream.