Anthony Scarpone-Lambert, a nursing student at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, created a wearable nightlight to help clinicians avoid disturbing patients at night.
During his day shift at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, Scarpone-Lambert steps into a patient’s room. The lights are off, but he knows he has to change the IV without disturbing the patient.
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He has two choices: turn on the overhead lights or attempt to use some sort of hand-held light to navigate in the darkness.
It’s this dilemma that he sought to fix by inventing the uNight Light, a wearable light-emitting diode, or LED, that allows nurses to illuminate their workspace without interrupting a patient’s sleep, reports New York Times.
Scarpone-Lambert, 21, a first-generation college student, developed the $20 uNight Light with Jennifferre Mancillas, BSN, RN, a nurse at Madera, Calif.-based Valley Children’s Hospital.
uNight Light is a wearable LED light made for nurses It is attachable to scrubs and completely hands-free, allowing frontline healthcare workers to illuminate their workspace while decreasing patient sleep disturbances on average by 70%.
“As nurses, we created uNight Light because we were tired of waking up our patients when we needed to turn on the intrusive overhead patient room lights to see. We are sick of using penlights, iPhone lights, and runners’ lights to try and see, so we created uNight Light,” the duo says.
Mr. Scarpone-Lambert and Jennifferre Mancillas, are calling the light a breakthrough for frontline health care workers.
“We really pride ourselves on being very specifically designed for the clinical setting,” said Mr. Scarpone-Lambert, 21, a senior at the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing who met Ms. Mancillas, 36, in 2019 at a hackathon sponsored by Johnson & Johnson that encouraged nurses to collaborate on solutions to health care problems.
Scarpone-Lambert is set to graduate nursing school at the University of Pennsylvania this year.
They also point out the light can be easily disinfected, which of course is very important for healthcare workers.
More than 400 nurses have tested the uNight Light, and more than 90 percent said it was helpful, the inventors said. They have received 1,500 orders and will start shipments next month, the New York Times report said.
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The pandemic, which has overwhelmed hospitals, underscores the need for the device, Mr. Scarpone-Lambert said, and further motivated him and Ms. Mancillas to bring it to market.
“I would say it’s been through Covid that this kind of innovation came to life,” he said. “It highlights the really important message that frontline health care workers and patients really deserve more support now more than ever.”
