Nine Seconds

The problem in the glove

In January 2022 Dana Tveit stood in the bay of the Little Cedar Volunteer Ambulance service with a stopwatch, watching an EMT with 19 years of experience try to open a trauma kit while wearing the insulated gloves she actually works in from November to March. The kit was a heat-sealed plastic pouch with a notched tear strip about the width of a fingernail. It took her 52 seconds and a pair of trauma shears.

“She wasn’t doing anything wrong. The package was designed by someone who opened it at a desk, at seventy degrees, with bare hands. Nobody bleeds at a desk.”

— Dana Tveit ’11, senior packaging engineer

Tveit is a senior packaging engineer at a medical products company in Lake City that assembles kits for ambulance services, rural clinics and fire departments across the region. Over the following months she timed 36 volunteer EMTs from eight Porter County services. In winter conditions the average time from “open the kit” to “pressure bandage in hand” was 41 seconds.

What she learned on campus

Tveit grew up in Grange Hollow, the daughter of a volunteer firefighter, and came to Porter in 2007 intending to study graphic design. In her first semester a friend dragged her to a Packaging Society meeting with the promise of free pizza. She switched majors in December.

“Packaging is the only engineering field where your end user is having the worst day of their life and also can’t read the instructions. I didn’t know that was a job. Once I did, I didn’t want any other one.”

— Dana Tveit

The Packaging Technology program is one of a small number of dedicated undergraduate packaging degrees in the country. Tveit remembers two parts of it best: the distribution-testing labs, where students drop, shake, crush and freeze packages until they fail, and a human-factors assignment in her junior year from Dr. Howard Gilbertson, who made every student open their own designs blindfolded.

“Mine took four minutes,” she said. “He wrote ‘Four minutes?’ on it in red and nothing else. I still have it.”

Designing for the worst five minutes

The redesign took 18 months and eleven prototypes. The changes, side by side:

The climate and drop testing was done partly at Porter, where student analysts at the Center for Packaging Innovation ran the prototypes through vibration tables and an environmental chamber set to simulate a kit left overnight in an unheated ambulance in January. One prototype passed every test except being dropped corner-first on a frozen floor, which, a student noted in the report, “is the only floor an ambulance has.”

The freezer test

The final trial took place in a walk-in freezer at a regional EMS training center in Lake City in February 2024, at 10°F. Thirty-six volunteer EMTs, wearing their own gloves, opened old and new kits in random order while a student from Porter’s packaging program held the stopwatch.

The new kit averaged nine seconds. One failure mode emerged on the first afternoon: the pull loop, at 38 millimeters, was the perfect size to snag on a stretcher strap. Tveit’s team added a fold-down tab that keeps the loop flat until it is needed. The fix took two weeks and is now the feature EMTs mention first.

“Thirty-six people in a freezer, and not one of them complained about the cold. They complained about the old kit. That’s when I knew we had the right test.”

— Dana Tveit

Why thirty-two seconds matters

Thirty-two seconds does not sound like much. Tveit is careful not to overstate it; she is a packaging engineer, not a physician, and she defers to the medical directors who approved the kit’s contents. But the services she worked with put it plainly: in a rural county, the first few minutes of a serious bleed are often handled by one or two volunteers who arrived in their own pickup trucks, before the ambulance does.

“Half our calls, the first person on scene is a volunteer who left a dairy barn or a kitchen table. They don’t have a partner yet. They have two hands and gloves on, and whatever’s in the kit. If the kit fights them, they’re fighting it alone.”

— Captain Mark Hellerud, Little Cedar Volunteer Ambulance

The redesign also changed what happens after the call. The old kits were frequently opened, half-used and thrown away because no one could tell what was left. The new trays, with items in fixed positions, make a used kit easy to restock. Two of the services that adopted it early report cutting kit spending by about a fifth, which for a volunteer ambulance squad funded largely by pancake breakfasts is not a small number.

Where the kits are now

The redesigned kits are now carried by 61 ambulance services and a dozen rural clinics, including all four in the Porter County Rural Health Network featured in this issue’s cover story. Tveit’s company assembles about 11,000 of them a year.

She has hired three Porter co-op students since 2022, and each spring she comes back to campus to critique projects in PKG 4900, Senior Design, where she makes every team open its prototype with winter gloves on.

“I tell them the same thing Dr. Gilbertson told me, except I say it out loud: you are not the user. Go find the user. Then go find the user’s gloves.”

— Dana Tveit ’11

Students interested in packaging can start with the Packaging minor or the program’s career outcomes. Alumni with a project for the Center can reach it through its page.