Breathing New Life Into Baby CPR Training

It was midnight. The Wilkinson garage labs were empty, save for a handful of students huddled around a table. Before them lay a baby doll, its chest opened to reveal a nest of wires and blinking lights. At the press of a remote, the recording of a baby’s cry rang out from the doll, and the students rejoiced: Their test was a success. 

This retrofitted robot-baby manikin — fondly dubbed “Tommy” by his creators — was the senior design project for a team of undergrads in the 2025 Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science (MEMS) cohort. In bringing Tommy to life, these students laid a potential path to help save the lives of real human infants. 

The MEMS senior design capstone challenges students to apply all they’ve learned during their four years at Duke to design a solution to a real-world problem. These problems are often sourced from clients in industry or the surrounding community.  

One client this year was Denise Briggs, a registered respiratory therapist at Duke Hospital.  Briggs works with families of babies with tracheostomies (trachs), which is a surgically created hole in the front of the neck that helps a person breathe. To make sure that parents can take care of these babies in an emergency, families must learn a special form of CPR before they can take their child home from the hospital. 

Previously, Briggs used a baby manikin of her own design — the original “Tommy the Trach Baby” — to train families. However, as essentially a plastic doll with a hole drilled in its neck, the original manikin had no way to give parents direct feedback about how well they were providing CPR. More responsive manikins with electronics do exist, but their high price makes it hard to distribute them for training. And direct feedback during training matters: out of the 12 families Briggs had been working with, eight of them had been unable to learn CPR successfully enough to bring their baby home. 

“Learning CPR is a great responsibility for families that often have no medical background or training,” Briggs said. “It makes me sad to see that so many of them are worried that they can’t meet the needs of their children.” 

Enter MEMS seniors Abby Paris, Ella Taylor, Blake Brown, Kate Flanagan, Olivia Lee and Hemil Patel — six undergrads with interests in the medical tech field. When they learned about Briggs’s dilemma, they decided to develop a baby manikin that was both affordable and provided real-time feedback.   

The students’ version of Tommy the Trach Baby is augmented with several mechanical and electrical parts, including a servo motor in his arm that mimics a pulse, a speaker in his torso that plays breathing noises, and colored lights in his belly that indicate whether someone is giving him chest compressions at the correct rate. Some components — such as the colored lights — automatically change in response to the trainee’s performance. Others, such as the pulse rate and types of breathing noises Tommy makes, are triggered through a remote carried by Briggs or whoever supervises the training. If a trainee performs CPR successfully, they’ll see Tommy’s chest rise and fall, feel his pulse return to normal, watch the correct lights blink on and off across his body, and hear him crying loud and clear. 

It wasn’t smooth sailing, however, to reach Tommy’s final form. The project required the students to use all of the knowledge they had gained in their four years at Duke…and then some. 

Brown recalled the struggles the team had with the electronics. Because none of them had dabbled in radio communication systems before, they spent a lot of late nights in the Wilkinson garage labs figuring out how to make things work. 

“I called it ‘solderpalooza,’” Brown joked, “Because there was a period of four or five days where at least two of us were in the lab at any given time, soldering for hours on end.” 

Eventually, those late nights spent with Tommy paid off. 

“It was around midnight one night, and we were all exhausted,” Brown said. “But we got everything wired up, we pressed the remote, and the pulse motor started moving at the rate we wanted, and Tommy started making the noises we wanted. It was a huge moment.” 

Flanagan believes the team’s success was partly due to the communication skills they had developed at Duke. “My last four years have been helpful in preparing me to know what resources to tap into, how to ask the right questions, and how to make connections with people,” she said. 

The students also enjoyed working with Briggs. Not only was the respiratory therapist happy to meet with them biweekly about the project, but she also helped make Tommy more cost-effective.  

“One of our criteria was to make Tommy’s design reproducible by people in lower-resourced communities, where they might not have access to the same materials that we do at Duke,” Flanagan explained.  

To this end, they made sure that Tommy’s design was compatible with common hospital supplies. When practicing on Tommy, trainees can use real-life trach tubes, ventilation masks and other expired, unopened equipment that hospitals otherwise discard. 

Briggs also had a great time working with the students. “They took my greatest dreams for this manikin and really outdid my expectations,” she said. 

For Paris, one of the most rewarding moments came on the day of the final project showcase. People of all ages, ranging from senior professors to little kids, were able to meet Tommy and practice CPR on him. 

“It was so cool that people were able to interact with Tommy. They could actually see our final product in use and know that he works,” Paris said. 

After graduation, the students handed the manikin off to Briggs, along with a meticulously documented manual in case Tommy ever needs repairs. They also developed instructions for how others can recreate Tommy with different budgets and resource levels. And because they came in under budget, they ordered a handful of extra manikins that will also be augmented and distributed to the five Duke Health departments that teach trach intervention. 

“This project will immensely increase the comfort level for families caring for their medically complex children at home,” Briggs said. “With the help of Tommy and the work that was put in by the MEMS students, we will not only be able to improve care for our patients here at Duke, but also be able to share these resources with communities where our patients reside.” 

As for the students, this project solidified for many of them that they want to pursue careers in medical tech. “It was fulfilling to realize that we could help even just one parent feel better about the CPR process,” Taylor said. “It was a moment of clarity where I knew I wanted to keep putting my efforts towards work like this.”