For their senior project, four Binghamton University engineering students decided to lend surgeons a helping hand.

Calvin Davis, Katie Schwiker, Lisa Benison and Matt Reiss created a prototype of puncture-resistant gloves for their capstone project. They were guided by professor George Catalano, as well as by bioengineering faculty advisors Guy German and Amber Doiron.

For engineering majors, a senior capstone project tasks students with finding a solution to a problem posed by a client. At the end of their senior year, the students present their product to the client.

BU alumnus Dr. Adam Fox, a trauma surgeon who works at Rutgers University Hospital, proposed the need for puncture-resistant gloves.

“He contacted our professor, and said ‘When people are doing surgery we have a lot of hands in a small area, it’s pretty common people get punctured with suture needles while working inside the human cavity. It’d be great if we had some solution to sort of prevent that or reduced it in general,’” Reiss said.

The team developed the gloves to reduce the number of needlestick injuries, or a piercing wound caused by a needle point. They were originally made for surgeons to use during abdominal surgery to protect the surgeons’ hands from getting pricked, thus reducing the risk of disease spread and chances of postoperative infection.

According to Schwiker, the gloves were developed out of a puncture resistant superfabric, which was then coated in latex. The team has been exploring possibilities for latex-free versions of the product, but have not made it their top priority.

“We determined that the number of latex allergies is really low,” Schwiker said. “In the future they could be coated with nitrile, but we didn’t have access to nitrile to use it in our design.”

The superfabric was originally designed to withstand abrasion, but Davis and Schwiker explained that layering this fabric makes it puncture-resistant to needles as well.

“The preliminary test showed that our gloves were able to prevent about 93-95% of needle sticks,” Schwiker said. “The material is made up of guard plates, so there is weaker space in between them. We used two layers of material to prevent this, but punctures could still happen.”

The team has handed off the prototype to Dr. Fox and a team of University researchers, who are working on getting the gloves FDA approved for surgical use.

According to Reiss, Fox has used the gloves on cadavers to test them with suture needles, but the product will not be used in operating rooms until approval is granted by both the FDA and the University.

“The University also has all the information, the design and what not, and technically the University owns it,” Reiss said. “We’ll see where it goes in the future.”