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Anna Young, our economist-turned-medical device designer at IIH’s Little Devices lab is featured the latest “Rural Surgery”, the official publication fo the Association of Rural Surgeons of India. This is perfect exposure for the fabulous work she’s doing towards an audience that operates where her devices are most needed.
To learn more about the IIH’s Solar Autoclave, visit the Little Devices lab’s new website.
Check out this great article on IIH’s liquid-handler hack (a la MakerBot) written by Boonsri Dickinson of SmartPlanet. http://bit.ly/zyicwM
Thanks, Boonsri!
This week, Aya Caldwell, IIH researcher and Program Manager at MGH’s Center for Global Health, will be at the Invent For Humanity Conference in Geneva speaking on the MGH-CGH model of advancing global health technologies from research to commercialization. Jose Gomez-Marquez will be in NYC on Friday at the New York Hall of Science speaking on the power of DIY-Health Technologies to enable nurses and doctors around the world to invent. Tomorrow (Jan 24) at 8AM EST Listen in to Boston’s WGBH to hear Cristina Quinn’s interview with the Little Device’s group — “Fighting Dengue Fever with Legos.”
Medgadet reports on a tourniquet designed by Dr. Richard Schwartz and Dr. John Croushorn, two emergency physicians from Georgia Health Sciences University and Trinity Medical Center in Birmingham. The tourniquet is used to slow lethal abdominal bleeding in soldiers, a difficult task for field medics given the large number of blood vessels in the stomach. Given Scwartz and Croushorn’s extensive wartime credentials, they are the perfect pair of physicians to design such a technology. So far the device has undergone testing in animals and humans to demonstrate proof of concept. The inventors have also received premarket clearance for the abdominal aortic tourniquet from the FDA and some early orders from the military. We’re excited to see progress on a much needed technology that could save countless lives. Read the full press release from Georgia Health Science University here.
This past week, we loaded up on SPF, packed up our prototypes and headed to Ocotal, Nicaragua, near the Honduran border. Ocotal, population 30K, is a small town full of inventive doctors, nurses and lab tech. It is also home of solar technology experts, las Mujeres Solares (the Solar Women). We collaborate with both groups on the design and manufacturing of some key technologies at our lab, including the foot-powered nebulizer and Solarclave. For these two technologies, we aim to create products that can be made from tools and materials found in any workshop around the world. Thus, it’s pretty important that we spend as much time as possible in Nicaragua testing and iterating the design. Working with las Mujeres Solares helps us to understand the local supply chains and fabrication methods. By involving nurses from nearby clinics in the early stage of the designs, we can brainstorm together the important features – compact storage, able to use by one person, repairable with local materials – that lead to a more sustainable product.
Seen here is Charles Hsu, IIH bio/physics expert and self-taught viola maker of MIT ’14 , setting up a bacteria test in the Solarclave prototype outside of las Mujeres Solares’ workshop. You’ll hear more from Charles in future IIH updates from Nicaragua. In the mean time, here’s a small clip from Alejandra of las Mujeres Solares explaining the Solarclave prototype built by their team at the workshop. English subtitles forthcoming!
With the contributions of 20 MIT and 40 Nicaraguan Health Professionals, our MEDIKits are part of the Smithsonian Cooper-Hewitt Design Museums exhibit, ”Design With the Other 90%: CITIES.” The exhibit is a fantastic compilation of technologies from emerging and developing economies and is organized by Cynthia E. Smith, the museum’s curator of socially responsible design.
IIH’s MEDIKits are one of sixty projects at the exhibit that address the complex issues arising from the unprecedented rise of informal settlements in emerging and developing economies. Design With the Other 90%: CITIES runs until January 9 at the United Nations Headquarters in NYC and will be available for travel there after. We’re thrilled that the MEDIKits are part of such an extraordinary exhibit. Thank you to Cynthia, Andrea, Melanie and team for the recognition and support!
The fourth and fifth Millennium Development Goals commit the international community to substantially reduce both child and maternal mortality. Innovative, low-cost technologies can act as a catalyst to reduce these deaths by offering better treatments, better risk stratification, and more efficient strategies to get effective treatment to mothers and children.
IIH Collaborator, the Center for Global Health at MGH (CGH), is excited to launch a Translational Grant to accelerate innovative health technologies to improve the lives of mothers, children, and newborns in resource-constrained settings. The CGH is interested in technologies that close the gap between patients and providers in the poorest regions of the world. This inaugural grant is designed to provide one-year of research and/or development support for an early stage, appropriate technology.
For more information and RFP application visit http://www.massgeneral.org/globalhealth/
Eligibility
The Translational Grant is open to graduate students, post‐doctoral trainees, or faculty from
Massachusetts General Hospital, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Harvard
University, Harvard‐affiliated teaching hospitals, Mbarara University of Science and Technology
(MUST) in Mbarara, Uganda, and members and affiliates of the Lata Medical Research
Foundation in Nagpur, India. Partnerships that include members from target countries (see
below) are particularly encouraged. Applications that support and build multi‐disciplinary,
multi‐institutional collaborations are preferred.
Translational Grant
The recipient will be awarded based on a one year budget, to commence in 2012. The
maximum award is $100,000 total costs; up to 25% indirect costs may be included in the
budget. Funds may be used alone or as a supplement in conjunction with other funding to
support a project.
Submission Deadline: February 1, 2012
by Abby McBride
Scope Correspondent
October 14, 2011
With a bucket, a pressure cooker, and 140 pocket-sized mirrors, MIT-affiliated researchers have invented a device that uses sunshine to sterilize surgical tools.
They are field-testing the device in Nicaragua as part of a broad plan to help people in developing countries cope with severely limited medical resources.
Most of Nicaragua’s 1,500 rural clinics lack the electricity to power an autoclave, which is a high-pressure chamber for sterilizing tools. Nurses resort to measures such as trekking to a regional health center over the weekend to sterilize a batch of instruments. They are often forced to either use unsterilized instruments or turn people away.
Ted Liao and Anna Young tackled this problem as part of MIT’sInnovations in International Health program (IIH). In July 2011 they developed a prototype of their solar autoclave, dubbed “Solarclave,” and over the summer they collaborated with rural Nicaraguans to hone the design.
Solarclave has a reflector that focuses sunlight onto a vessel containing the surgical instruments. Light rays heat the vessel to over 300° F, surpassing the 250° degree minimum needed to sterilize the instruments inside.
The vessel is simply a modified pressure cooker purchased from a local Nicaraguan market, says lead engineer Liao, a medical student at Boston University. The cooker is wrapped in fiberglass insulation and built into an upside-down bucket, which is suspended a couple of feet above the ground.
On the ground below the vessel sits the reflector, a mosaic of small, ten-cent mirrors arranged at different angles on a plywood lattice. Light bounces off of each mirror and up into the bucket, striking and heating the presser cooker inside. The contents are sterilized within about an hour.
The Solarclave’s heavy insulation keeps the vessel hot even when the sun goes behind a cloud. “We did our local testing during the rainy season, and we were able to hit required temperatures at least once each day between batches of clouds,” wrote Liao in an email.
One Solarclave costs about $150 in local materials and consumes no fuel, making it a practical option for rural clinics. A kerosene-powered stovetop autoclave, on the other hand, would cost about $300 up front and use $4 worth of fuel per use.
To build the prototypes, IIH has worked with a Nicaraguan women’s manufacturing cooperative, Las Mujeres Solares. “We’ve shown that what we’ve designed can be built by this group, and it’s quite easy for them to do it,” says Liao.
IIH also field-tested the device with local doctors and nurses over the summer, continually tweaking the design to address logistical questions such as “where are they going to store it, how are they going to move it out, how are they going to set it up, how are they going to adjust it,” Liao explains.
After making a few more changes to the device based on the recent testing, IIH plans to transition into an advisory role. The organization hopes that local manufacturing groups will continue to build and sell Solarclaves on their own, making modifications as they see fit. “The idea is for this to be sustainable,” says Young, IIH’s Research and Development officer.
Solarclave is one of a suite of collaborative projects that IIH has initiated in Nicaragua and other developing countries. Other innovations include bike pump-powered nebulizers, diagnostic tests made of paper, and build-it-yourself kits that allow medical professionals to mix and match parts to create the equipment they need.
By emphasizing collaboration and inventiveness, IIH believes it is successfully empowering rural residents to take control of their own health care problems. The collaborative approach is “awesome,” agrees Lori McIlvaine, a founder of the nonprofit organization Salud del Sol, which helped fund the Solarclave project.
IIH director Jose Gomez-Marquez points out that the program does face obstacles such as funding and the challenge of sustaining local engagement in between field trips. It’s important to keep in touch with the community and press on, says Liao. “We try to keep the ball rolling all the time.”
Behavioral Diagnostics are a combination of standard point-of-care diagnostics coupled with behavioral economic algorithms that use incentives, pattern recognition, and remote monitoring to encourage healthy behavior.
