Modern medical devices are typically designed for clinics with professional support staff and the knowledge that replacements can be obtained quickly. Moreover, attention is given to high tech, breakthrough machinery that improves the performance over previous generations of similar devices. Though this is all well and good, it does does not address the challenges that clinicians in poor parts of the world face. In remote, impoverished lands medical devices have to be rugged, easily fixed if broken, and simple to operate by ad-hoc volunteers helping out the village doctor. To this end, the laboratory of José Gómez-Márquez at MIT has been focusing on taking a different approach to develop new versions of common medgadgets. To recognize his work, Gómez-Márquez just won Technology Review’s TR35 2009 Humanitarian of the Year award.
Here’s José Gómez-Márquez describing some prototypes developed in his lab:
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