Little Devices That Could

Saturday, February 24, 2007

Using Bollywood to Teach Folks About Drip Irrigation

India's International Development Enterprises (IDEI), one of the Acumen Fund's porfolio of companies uses a Bollywood style film to teach people about drip irrigation. They've come out with a new type of drip irrigation system that is affordable. The kits are intended for microenteprises aimed at farmers.

More about this after the jump to Worldchanging...

Cotton Candy FutureFood

Scientists have genetically engineered cotton seed to make it safe for human consumption.

Cotton Candy rocks. It's light, sweet, melts in your mouth, and is fun to eat. Real cotton also rocks, it's light, white, you can cut it up, use it to clean---okay, it's not THAT exciting. Regular cotton also contains gossypol, a poisonous chemical that lowers potassium to dangerous levels and can cause fatigue or paralysis. Keerti Rathore at Texas A&M has removed the gossypol from the cotton. The result is a substance that remains is 22% protetin. According to Rathore, the seeds can be roasted and salted.

The New Scientist reports

Rathore says the kernel of the non-toxic cotton seed can be roasted and salted and has a "nutty flavour". He says the kernel can also been ground into a flour and combined with wheat and corn flours to enrich them with protein.

Danny Llewellyn, a plant biologist at CSIRO in Australia who has also been trying to remove gossypol from cottonseed, says the research will "allow cottonseed to be used more widely as an animal feed…and extend its uses as a substitute for other high-value oils, like canola (rapeseed) oil."

Already, unmodified cottonseed is used in limited amounts to feed cattle, because bacteria in their rumen detoxify it. But the modified seed could make cotton plants more valuable to farmers because they could sell the seed as feed for pigs and chickens, or even human food, once they have sold the fibres around the seeds.

"It will certainly be a useful addition to cotton farmers in developing countries who grow cotton as a cash crop," says Llewellyn. China and India are the world's first and third largest cotton producers, respectively.

BusinessWeek features companies that make nice

I meant to write about this earlier. Catch the January 29, 2007 of BusinessWeek. The cover story features socially responsible practices and the companies that embraces them. Among them, Unilever (also featured in in FP here). Their Bangladesh operation sponsors a floating clinic appropriately called the Lifebuoy Friendship Hospital.

It's a great article on corporate social responsibility, doing business in the developing world, and making some money to boot. Read the full text here.

Interesting in the floating hospital? Click here and here.

Bonus points for those who've actually used Lifebuoy soap---very popular in Tegucigalpa. Full disclosure: Unilever is not a sponsor of LTDC. The naming rights to the blog is still open for bids.

2007 MIT IDEAS Competition

The 2007 MIT IDEAS Competition is in full swing. The teams being formed in and around Cambridge, MA include the following:

A specially designed training bicycle for mentally disabled people
Portable water distiller
System of wound care therapy centers
Corn flour milling machine for yummy tortillas
Electric generator using a specially designed solar concentrator
Many more operating under the radar!

The IDEAS competition at MIT brings togethor projects that focus on community and international development questions answered by novel projects backed by technology and invention. Started in 2001, the competition has propelled many projects that have gone on to become sustainable long term endeavors in energy, water sanitation, microfinance, medical devices, agriculture, and information technology.

Friday, February 16, 2007

The Need for Wheelchairs

Recently, a friend emailed me and drew my attention to the pressing need for affordable easy-to-use wheelchairs. I'm including an excerpt of the email and leaving the names out for anonymity:

"One day I was in the office of N, the U.S.-trained engineer who
adapts and fits wheelchairs for the ISIC patients. A woman came in,
pleading with N for a wheelchair for her husband, who was about
to be discharged from the hospital. Her husband had received free
medical care, but there was no money to pay for a wheelchair.
Afterward I discussed the matter with N. Couldn't this man get
one of the very inexpensive wheelchairs that have been developed for
the third world, basically plastic lawn chairs with wheels? No, they
are not suitable, said N; they allow the patients to be pushed
around, but are impossible for a person to push by himself. Besides,
at $40, they are prohibitively expensive. So, I asked, how much would
a good wheelchair cost? Oh it's very expensive, about $120.
Nekram pointed out that the need is very great with thousands of
people in this man's position. But Vicky and I were impressed that so
little money and just a little encouragement could go a long way to
empower these patients."

Needless to say, I started poking around online .. and lo and behold, I discovered the Wheelchair foundation. This organization was started by Ken Behring in June 2000. Wheelchair foundation estimates that there is a need for 100 million wheelchairs, and their near term goal is to get 1 million wheelchairs to people in 5 years. A key observation that I made was that they are able to get a wheelchair that costs $1700 in the US, to someone in a developing country, for about $150. Read more about it here

Tuesday, February 13, 2007

L.E.G.S.: LeTourneau Engineering Global Solutions

My friend Alissa recently informed me about this project that is going on at Le Tourneau. An excerpt from their website...

The LeTourneau Engineering Global Solutions initiative was formed in early 2004 through the vision of Dr. Roger Gonzalez at LeTourneau University with the aim of providing low cost, high-quality prosthetic limbs for people in developing nations. The initial team consisted of five undergraduate engineering students under Dr. Gonzalez's direction. With the goal of creating a lower-limb prosthesis for people with amputations above the knee, the initial design phase involved significant research and evaluation of needs. The project focused on developing a high-quality polycentric knee and an energy-returning foot as the key components of the project.

Friday, February 2, 2007

Bubblicious: Teen uses BubbleWrap to Enhance the Texture of Prosthetics

Grayson Rosenberg has invented a way new use for Bubble Wrap: a cost effective cosmetic skin covering for prosthetics.

Rosenberger was able to turn a basic artificial leg into a more realistic one using a heat gun to mold Bubble Wrap cushioning around the steel rod of a prosthetic limb to give it muscle-like tone and shape. He said his invention should benefit amputees in Africa who are viewed strangely because they have to "walk around with an open metal rod" as a leg.

I learned two things:
1. There is a BubbleWrap competition for Young Inventors
2. BubbleWrap is trademarked. I think the generic name is "protective packaging".

Naturally, this qualifies as another great Little Device That Could. Rosenberg's background has taken him to missionary trips to Ghana where he gained insight into a way to give amputees some dignity regardless of their country's economic status.

Sunday, January 21, 2007

Howtopedia, technology goodness gone wiki!

This is the first unsolicited email that I've been pleased to get in a long time. In fact, this is really neat.

Think of Instructables meets Hackaday meets Wikipedia within the development context. The very elegant outcome is something called Howtopedia. It's wonderful how-to list arranged in a wiki fashion covering topics that include Healthcare, Energy, Small Business, Food Processing and others.

The email they sent states that Howtopedia is a Swiss non-profit supported by Practical Action (which we covered earlier) and the International Network for Technical Info (INTI). When you look at the site, some of the articles will look familiar if you've checked out Practical Action's technical briefs.

It's community geared and thanks to the wiki metaphor, I can't wait to see what other users contribute. Who knows, I might throw in a recipe or two.

This ties in very well into our previous coverage of open source design initiatives. I hope Howtopedia fares well.

The excerpt below shows a method of refrigeration.

AIDG has lists a similar repository called Appropedia. I'm less familiar with them, but at first glance, Howtopedia seems to have many more articles. They are also available in English, French, and Spanish. Way to go Howtopedia and Practical Action. I'm a fan.

Learn more here.

Jiva Health and Teledoc

In keeping with our theme today, here is an interesting link to Jiva doc, an enterprise based in India and bringing affordable health to people in rural areas.

TeleDoc—a Jiva Health initiative, funded by the Soros Foundation, which seeks to bridge this critical gap between rural populations and quality health services by using Java-enabled mobile telephones to provide village-based healthcare workers with real-time ability to record and transmit diagnostic information.

Jiva’s expert panel of doctors analyzes this data, and then prescribes medication and treatment. Medicines are compounded at a regional office, picked up by TeleDoc field workers, and delivered to rural patients in the comfort of their homes—all for 70 rupees or US $1.50 per consultation.

Jiva's TeleDoc Program seeks to:

Deliver low-cost diagnostic and prescription services to rural villages currently underserved by existing healthcare systems

Improve treatment of prevalent diseases in rural settings

Increase the workload capacity of doctors, enabling sustainable operations with unit-price reductions in the cost of services

Provide employment opportunities for rural villagers

Afford networked health-care recordkeeping and intake mechanisms to improve lifetime care for individuals and facilitate large-scale epidemiological analysis

Attain a positive cash flow in three years and generate revenues sufficient to fuel growth of the system by the end of the fourth year

Saturday, January 20, 2007

Intel Telemedicine: Wi-Fi solutions

The geeks at Intel and Berkeley have teamed up to provide a comprehensive solution to impact the developing world. TIER is a research group at the University of California at Berkeley, investigating the design and deployment of new technologies for emerging regions. This is a multi-disciplinary project that includes both technologists and social scientists and real deployments to ensure that the work seeks real-world solutions. Primary funding comes from the National Science Foundation, with additional support from Intel, HP, Microsoft, UNDP, IIT Delhi, IIT Kanpur, Grameen Bank and the Markle Foundation.

One of the projects from this huge effort is a partnership with the Aravind Eye hospital in India providing a useful telemedical application to reach rural populations. Read more about it here.

Hacking Meds to Make a, eerr, New Drugs!

Scientists find way to slash cost of drugs by reverse engineering existing molecular structure and tweaking it to form a technically new and patent free drug

In other news: Porsche dealers project shortage due to meteoric rise in 2007 patent attorney fees

A couple of scientists at Imperial College have devised a way to analyze and recreate the molecular structure of a new drug, tweak it and make it into a "different" drug---thereby skirting the rights of the original patent holder, releasing into the world, and saving lives.

That's the general gist of the story, as reported by The Guardian this week. How I undertand, it's making generics out of proprietary drugs before their 20 year patent reign. This is possible because they are essentially a different compound.

We like a good hack just as the next person, but there's some issues with the approach:

We're not hacking the Colonel Sanders KFC's 11 secret herbs and spices to yummy fried chicken. These are drugs and they involve clinical trials. Last I checked, clinical trials still matter when you're talking about new drugs.
Yes, they can argue that these are generics, which may be eligible for fast track approval (505(b)(2). Wait, if they are generics, then how does that differentiate them from the original drug in terms of patent law? I'm not a lawyer, but I can see a good one arguing this. If it walks like Lipitor, smells like Lipitor, tastes like Lipitor (wait what is that I see under the microscope? Lipitor-like strucuture?) shouldn't it be Lipitor? No, judge, that's Lypytore, Lipitor's estranged half brother.
The drug companies probably saw this coming a while back. There's an interesting company in Australia called iCeutica who's doing some reverse engineering of their own on behalf of drug companies. The idea is that they can shrink the formulation of the compounds to nanosizes, which affects how it gets absorbed in the body. Since it's a new type of formulation, that makes it a new drug (sound familiar?) In this case, the strategy extends the lifetime of the patent another 20 years. Watch for nanosized Aleve that gets absorbed a lot faster than the generic naproxen right besides it.

There's good coverage of the story at the THD blog and some compelling arguments about collaborative innovation versus reverse engineering at the New Paradign Innovation Blog.

Update: Perhaps this is like the perfume knock-offs that cost $10 instead of $45. Sometimes you really can't tell the difference. Although, I'm told the knock offs don't last as long. Again, an argument for #1 here.

Telemedicine - another variant

We recognize that Telemedicine is a concept that has been around for a long time. However, the harsh reality of this healthcare concept is that it has not yet been widely adopted primarily because of the lack of a supporting infrastructure: equipment, maintenance and training for end-users. This effort by the CSAIL group at MIT has built an email client that is optimized for image annotation and sharing over email rather than the telecommunication intensive real-time video telemedical systems that permeate the landscape.

An interesting paper with an overview of the technical details is here

Low-cost CD4 counters for Africa

Professor Robinson and his team at Purdue are developing a low-cost CD4 counter for AIDS patients in Africa. The goal of the project is to reduce the cost from $12 to under 50c. This effort is being supported Parker Hannefin.

Dr. Robinson makes a key observation that we feel is important to keep in mind when developing technologies for low-resource settings:

"The fancy $100,000 machines are very complicated because they are designed to perform a hundred different tests, but you only need one," Robinson said. "So you are paying for an instrument to do a hundred things when it only needs to do one, and then, at the end of the day, it's not even doing one thing. It's a real tragedy. Our cell analyzers will do only one test and do it well."

Read more about it here

Berkeley and CITRIS: Network Imaging

The novel idea is that instead of having the expensive hard-to-maintain computing power sitting at a remote site, why not have cheap data imaging collection at the remote sites and then utilize an urban hospital to do the heavy lifting. The first Distributed Network Imaging experiments were based on electrical impedance tomography (EIT), an imaging technology that constructs 3D visualizations based on the electrical resistivity of the tissue under study. The data is painlessly gathered through an array of inexpensive electrodes placed on the body. Read more about it here

Here is a link to Professor Rubinsky's homepage

Update: From Boing Boing---

Medical imaging via modem that will enable remote village doctors to perform minimally-invasive cancer surgery.

Prosthesis in the Developing World

We've all heard about the Jaipur foot project and its founders Dr Sethi and Chandra, the sculptor who made it happen. Recently I came across this link from 1989 that shows that mechanical engineers attempted an intriguing solution: using laser scanning with a CAD system to try to make fitted prostheses. This was an ambitious attempt to do the following:
(1) Develop a non-contact imaging device capable of capturing a three-dimensional topographical record of the amputees' residual limb
(2) Develop a computer software system that would allow the prosthetist to design a prosthetic socket that is biomechanically correct for production by a numerically computer controlled milling machine
(3) Develop production molding tools for the manufacture of lightweight prosthetic plastic components
(4) Field test the new lightweight all plastic system.

Read more about it here

Friday, January 19, 2007

Global Health technologies at Northwestern

It appears that Professor David Kelso and Professor Matt Glucksberg had a vision to engineer devices specifically with the developing world in mind, way before Jose and myself :)

From the Univ of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Fall 2006 Bioengineering Series

Most medical devices have been designed for industrialized, high-income countries, and as a result, are not affordable in the developing world where per capita healthcare expenditures are less than $100 a year. The high cost of these devices is not inevitable; it is simply the result of decisions made by the design team in addressing the needs of their stakeholders. Given a different target market and set of user requirements, more affordable devices could be designed with available technologies.

Read more about what the Center for Innovation in Global Health Technologies (CIGHT)is doing here

We're inspired by people like Dave Kelso and we hope that more elite engineering schools will take the lead in developing appropriate medical technologies to improve health outcomes in the developing world.