Brainstorming - The Ideas that Didn't Make It

Brainstorming can be tough... Especially when attempting to implement a novel diagnostic device. Over the last week or so, I've been trying to think of innovative ideas. I've tried several strategies: combining existing technologies, thinking back to previous projects or labs I've worked on, evaluating existing diagnostic protocols, shifting contexts... Despite coming up with several ideas they all had their flaws and didn't seem to catch on with the rest of the group. Here's a couple examples.

Building off of previous lab experience, I considered a sleep monitoring device. After all, there are many easy to measure and informative biological signals during sleep. These include ECG, EMG, EEG, and EOG data. These signals vary through the night in each shift of sleep cycle. With careful monitoring of such signals, one could see if anything was irregular in their sleep pattern. For instance, too long or too short of time spent within REM can greatly affect mood, alertness, memory, and many other conditions. Our device could monitor one or more of a subject's biological signals and be programmed to analyze and interpret the data and present its results in a useful, user-friendly form.

Another idea came to me when considering a semi-neglected problem: HPV in men. HPV is very common and most sexually active people will have it at some point in their life. High risk types of HPV can cause cervical, anal, penile or throat cancer. Lower risk types which don't cause cancer can cause genital warts. Overall however, symptoms are rare, and the virus will typically go away on its own within a couple of years. Women after the age of 30 are recommended to get tested regularly: a pap test and an HPV test. The HPV test tells whether the patient has the virus. Having the virus alone is not considered overly problematic, as it typically goes away on its own without symptoms. The pap test checks for irregular cell morphology that could lead to cancer. Having a positive pap test is more reason for concern. There's no recommended test for men, due to how rare symptoms are. However, as rare as it is, due to the large number of people that get HPV, approximately 8,400 people within the US are diagnosed with oropharyngeal cancer that may be caused by HPV. Men are approximately 3 times more likely than women to get this type of cancer. Thus, despite the fact that oroparyngeal cancer is "rare," it still affects a great amount of people. In addition to men having no regular screening, there is no approved test (for men or women) to find HPV in the mouth or throat. Since over screening is an economic concern, a cheap, perhaps self/home test could have potential.