CEDARVILLE — Injuries to the carotid artery in the neck often happen from military combat, trauma and even tragically on the ice during a recent hockey game.

Seconds are precious and stopping the bleed is extremely difficult because a traditional tourniquet can’t be placed around the neck.

However, a new lifesaving device created at Cedarville University is months away from possible FDA approval and nationwide distribution.

The device is called the Arterial Restrictive Clamp, or ARC.

“This device, 100% occlusion in ten seconds,” said Cedarville University mechanical and biomedical engineering professor, Dr. Tim Norman.

Saving lives in seconds is the motto.

Norman has been helping a group of students make the arc a reality.

“Once they have this on, the patient is still getting oxygen to their brain from the other side, they’re still able to breathe through their airway because that’s open, and it’s just a matter of how quickly can you get this patient to help,” said Norman as he demonstrated how the arc works.

The idea started in 2018 with student Lauren Edmonson’s Capstone project.

She was an EMT with the local fire department and noticed a void when it came to treating this type of injury.

“When I first was learning about carotid artery injuries in my EMT class, we were posed with a scenario of a car accident where an EMT had to manually control the artery flow that had been lacerated or cut. For me, that was nerve-racking just because I knew if I had one patient with a carotid artery injury and several other patients, I’d have to pick and choose which patient I’d be able to treat and the carotid artery patient might not be the one that was saved,” Edmonson said.

Under Norman’s guidance, four engineering students came on board.

“The medics in the military carry a backpack and you really want to have devices that are lightweight and perform more than one function,” Norman said.

Along with being able to clamp down to stop the bleed, the device actually has some additional features.

It can pop apart, offering two extra ways to help save a life.

The first extra part can help offer compression to injured parts of the body and the second helps with breathing.

“This also works as a laryngoscope. We can take it, a little light right there turns on with a switch, and we can use it as a laryngoscope for intubation,” said Norman.

For Norman, it’s a good feeling to see student’s work and visions paying off.

“When this gets out and people are using it and saving lives, they’ll really feel like that’s a complete of what they were doing in their career was creating things that can be used in society for the greater good. I think they’ll feel really good about that,” he said.

“It was kind of a very novel idea in the medical community. It was thought of as farfetched so to have it in our hands and be able to use it on models and show through different experiments that it’s actually very feasible and works well is just absolutely phenomenal,” said Edmonson.

The team is hoping for full FDA approval by May.

Edmonson graduated from Cedarville University in 2019 with her Bachelor’s in Science and Allied Health.

She’s on her way to graduating from medical school this year.