Rudolph Design Studio was recently recognized in Notre Dame's award winning NBC video series - What Would You Fight For? - for their work on the OneAir Avian Influenza Monitoring System. Rudolph Design Studio provided design research, industrial design, and user interface design for the project, providing key insights to support technology transfer. Watch the full video here: https://youtu.be/XhSn5da8xP4

Here's a short version of the story:

Highly pathogenic avian influenza, commonly known as bird flu, is a virus that spreads among birds and livestock. The virus infects chickens, hens, ducks, geese, water birds, pigeons, sparrows, cows, and, on occasion, humans. It can be spread through direct contact with a sick animal; contact with animal byproducts like saliva, mucus, or feces; or, perhaps most nerve-racking, through airborne transmission.

Bird-to-person transmission is rare, and typically only results from close, unprotected exposure to an infected bird — but for egg producers like Hertzfelds Poultry Farms in rural Ohio, that is a fear. What's more, given how contagious the disease is, if one bird is infected, the entire flock needs to be depopulated.

To protect the safety of their flock and employees, the Hertzfelds sprang into action with enhanced biosecurity measures, such as building a large truck wash and blacktopping the driveway to reduce the number of puddles. The fourth-generation egg farmers also found they needed to start regularly monitoring and testing their birds for infection.

University of Notre Dame researchers Nosang Myung and James Rudolph - featured in NBC’s “What Would Fight For?” video series during Notre Dame’s football game against Purdue on Sept. 20 - are working together to develop an “electronic nose” that would sense the infection. Myung, the Bernard Keating-Crawford Professor of Engineering, is creating the technology for the sensor, while Rudolph, the Paul Down Assistant Professor of Industrial Design, is contributing to the practicality of using it.

“Technologists develop the technology to be able to measure, look at things, to do things that humans can't do,” Rudolph said. “As a designer, my role is to make that technology accessible, usable, safe, and a good experience for users.”

Rudolph is known for his work in designing solutions for complex health care challenges. He has worked on everything from robotics to drug delivery devices to wearable monitors.

With Myung, he interviewed nearly 100 potential users to see what they would want and need in a sensor. They learned how time-consuming the standard swabs were. They learned about how feathers could clog a sensor. They learned the device would need changeable filters. And they learned that the interface needed to be simple and user-friendly for busy farmers so they don't need to bring in technicians. The result is two small, straightforward prototypes, Rudolph said. One is for larger farms and can be mounted in a barn, almost like a smoke detector, to provide continuous monitoring. The other is a handheld device for smaller farms or backyard enthusiasts. Neither format requires swabs; they instead continually sniff the air for scents of sickness.

“If you can't translate the research into something that's useful and impactful and could be used safely, like medical devices,” Rudolph said, “then you're not going to generate the impact, the positive change.”

Read the story on the Arts & Letters website here: https://al.nd.edu/news/latest-news/fighting-for-faster-virus-detection/