Cork student wins award for cast design

Finger injuries: An Irish student has won an international medical engineering award for designing a new form of hand cast for finger injuries.

Kathleen Hurley, a student of Cork Institute of Technology (CIT), won the Best International Medical Device Design and Development award for Finger Fit, a light cast for fractures to the fifth metacarpal - the baby finger.

The competition was run by the Institution of Mechanical Engineers in Britain last week. There are 12,800 such injuries, known as "boxer's fracture", each year in Ireland and Britain.

However, because these injuries usually occur at weekends and Bank Holidays among men aged 20-40, it is young, drunk men falling over rather than boxers who are most at risk.

The existing treatment of placing the hand in a plaster cast for six weeks creates a number of difficulties. The hand is unusable during that time and requires physiotherapy when the cast comes off to reactivate wasted muscles.

The project started with orthopaedic surgeon James Harty who had identified the limitations of a cast for this type of injury and contacted CIT asking for an alternative, Ms Hurley said.

"The only guideline he gave was that he wanted a three-point pressure system to fully support the joint as it healed," she said.

Ms Hurley spent months researching the project and liaising with Mr Harty before settling on a design. She described her award-winning prototype as a "one-fingered glove system that supports the injured fifth finger".

Instead of plaster, Ms Hurley's design uses a neoprene glove to which an aluminium splint is attached with Velcro straps. The fourth and fifth finger are held together within the glove. The splint has a three-point pressure system to fully immobilise the fifth knuckle while the injury heals.

"We reckon that the healing process will be shortened by about two weeks and the construction of the cast means the wearer can work, eat and use a shower. And because only one finger is immobilised, there is no requirement for physiotherapy when the cast is removed," she said.