Automated Tourniquet to Control Battlefield Hemorrhage

Currently, over 60% of preventable battlefield deaths are due to uncontrolled extremity hemorrhage, which translates to about 165 deaths per year. The current standard of care, the Combat Application Tourniquet (CAT), has an unacceptably high complication rate, and is applied incorrectly around 47% of the time. To make matters worse, the CAT is often not sufficient to fully occlude blood flow in the limb. Furthermore, the CAT has a safe time of only about 2 hours, while military evacuations can take anywhere from 30 minutes to 16 hours.
Design Team 13 aims to solve this problem by designing an automated tourniquet that can last up to 48 hours while calculating and adjusting, based on various physiological factors, to the minimum limb occlusion pressure (LOP), thus allowing for a safer, longer lasting solution.