HerniAid

Approximately 5 million adults in the US are currently living with a hernia. A large subset of these patients have ventral hernias, which the average person has a 10% chance of developing in their lifetime. 20% of ventral hernia cases lead to emergent surgery, resulting from abdominal contents being trapped in the hernia (incarcerated), or worse, when blood supply is cut off from the herniated tissue (strangulation). Emergent procedures often require bowel  resection, which has both immediate (site infections, mortality) and long-term (hernia recurrence) consequences. Emergent surgery is also vastly more expensive for both patients and health care providers, costing approximately 10 to 20 times more than an elective surgery. However, there is often a gap between diagnosis and surgery where the surgeon is unable to continuously monitor a patient’s hernia. During this waiting period, there is ample opportunity for the hernia to become incarcerated and eventually strangulate, yet there are no easily accessible methods to detect this worsening, making the chance of emergent procedures much higher. Thus, a method of monitoring at this point of intervention will improve patient outcomes at a lower cost to both patients and health care providers. Our solution aims to track hernia progression non-invasively by utilizing physical metrics to provide surgeons and patients with real-time data to inform their decisions.