Congrats to Amy Smith on Winning Popular Mechanics Breakthough Award!

Popular Mechanics just awarded MIT's own Amy Smith with a Breakthrough Award for her pioneering work in bringing technology to developing countries.

The Secret Life Bees: Diagnostics

Artist Susana Soares is creating a series of beautiflly crafted chambers that collect air samples, or breath samples. Her BEE'S project builds on bee's acute odor perception.  In my book, these a wonderful example of good elegant design that can have wonderful apps in the developing world. No electronic noses, or fancy micromechanical systems, or complex diagnostic arrays: just a handful of dutiful bees trained to be attracted to something which produces a yes/no response. 

Another company is working on using the bees as portable explosives detectors.

This reminds of a previous project funded by the World Bank to use trained rats to smell and detect TB in samples. I like the Soares approach more though, after all, no one's put a rat on a cereal box design yet.

More at Proto

CIMIT Innovation Congress 2008

Dates: October 28-29, 2008
Location: Back Bay Events Center, 200 Berkeley Street
Boston, MA

CIMIT, which stands for Center for Integration of Medicine & Innovative Technology, is a unique consortium of hospitals and research labs in the Boston area. It is holding it's annual Innovation Congress which will include their Exploratorium featuring a dedicated section to Global Health. If you are in the Boston area, watch for IIH and LTDC innovations in the area including the XoutTB System, an incubator for the developing world by team led by Dr. Kris Olson, ClickDiagnostics, and several other devices and the innovators behind them.

Be sure to register early at
CIMIT

MIT's Development Ventures

If you read this blog, it would be hard for you not to know about MIT's D-Lab. What could be forgiven is that you may not know about the newest newest member in the D-Lab family of classes: MIT's Development Ventures.

Development Ventures (DV) is an exploratory developmental entrepreneurship seminar on founding, financing, & building viable ventures in developing nations and emerging regions. DV is a member of the larger D-Labs family of classes addressing Development-Design-Dissemination at MIT. Since 2001 we have challenged students to use business methods to tackle the UN Millennium Development Goals by crafting enduring, scalable, and economically viable solutions to problems faced by at least One Billion people worldwide.

This is the 7th year the class is offered, spinning out about 12 real world companies focused on international development challenges. Under the careful guidance of Joost Bonsen and Sandy Pentland, the class, taught in the heart of the MIT Media Lab, combined top flight technologists with saavy business strategies that are incredibily informed about doing business in emerging economies.

I'm going to be attending the class all semester and hope to give you some weekly insights as I learn from the next crop of companies addressing the millenium development goals.

More at MIT

Indian Innovators on the Discovery Channel

I really have to catch up on my posts, and AIDG's Blog never misses a step. The latest posts include

Indian Appropriate Technology Innovators

and an interesting article on the NYTimes on the "factory frontier" of India and the plight of farmers fighter the transformation of their crop land.

MIT's D-Lab Founder Amy Smith on Popular Mechanics

Popular Mechanics has a wonderful article on Professor Amy Smith, founder of D-Lab, and orchestrator of any array of international development technologies at MIT.

For those of us who get a close up view of her work at MIT, the article provides a nice reminder that technology for development can and will make a difference one life at a time. Professor Smith is a pioneer who is making that happen.

Hat tip to AIDG

More at Popular Mechanics

No Fedex, No problem: GPS-enabled robot airplanes transport your lab samples from the middle of nowhere

I totally want one of one these.



According to the fine folks at Medgadget and Gizmodo, these GPS-guided model airplanes carry lab samples from remote areas to a central lab.

Now, I really don't care if UPS is available, I want my swab sample sent Predator style.

Open Source Infectious Disease Reporting

TriSano promises to do away with the flurry of faxes doctors are currently using (are you kidding me?) to report specific conditions that could point to a larger public health concern. The name comes from
Tri is a prefix meaning three. Tri represents the collaboration between local, state and federal entities. It depicts the primary disciplines of public health: epidemiology, biostatistics and health services. Tri also refers to the epidemiological triad of people, place, and time.

Sano is an adjective meaning promoting good health.

There's an interesting white paper here: http://www.csinitiative.com/downloads/CSIWhitepaper5-8.pdf

and a more comprehensive post at Medgadget

Neat Stuff Round Up

LTDC has been hit or miss lately because the author is working on stuff but not writing enough about it. To make up for it, we'll rely on a massive link drop covering what the health superstars at THD Blog are up to:

Th 60s: We have not succumbed to pollution and chemicals, but Rachel Carson warned us about it. As the Berlin Wall went up, so did the Peace Corps! The CCCP sent Yuri to Space and the USA followed with their own astronaut...and the Foreign Assistance Act was launched.

A comprehensive review of the Global Health Council meeting

A Global Health Video that made the Top 10 List at TED

Mosquirix - A new vaccine for Malaria by Glaxo: $100 Million in R&D, 16,000 children in a trial over 7 countries. The target data for launch is 2011.

Closer to home: MIT's Innovations in Technology, Governance and Globalization is free until August 30th. This is a great journal and I highly recommend it. More importantly, don't miss Aman and Jaspal's Aurolab article found here.

And for the mobilephiles our there a roundup of mobile phones in global health

Another human-powered ambulance

When did this














become this
















Medgadget highlights a design from Yanko Design that propels this ambulance by pedal and solar power aimed at resource poor areas.

Spotlight on MIT's new Innovations in International Health: LTDC is Institutionalized)

It's almost been a month since my last post. We have been incredibly busy with a whole new program that aims to nurture, discover, invent, and launch the next little devices that could. So hopefully my absence is justified by the some of the offline project you'll read about soon.

MIT's International Development Initiative has launched Innovations in International Health. IIH is a collaborative research program that spans across MIT Departments and brings in partners from around the country and around to world to create a rich multidisciplinary environment to launch medical technology for the next four billion.

I'll let you visit the site iih.mit.edu to learn more.

Back to work for me, but I'm back with the program.

Accidental medical device of the month: The Taser

This one is better than the superglue for toothaches covered a few months back. The WSJ Health blog describes the case of policeman who had to tase man while he was in the ER (it's better than it sounds).

Turns out the Taser jolted his heart back into a normal rhythm.
more at WSJ.com

Combating Cervical Cancer with Cameraphones

This is the start of a small series covering the projects at MIT's D-Lab II, Information and Communications Technologies for Development, or ICT4D short. The results of the semester-long class resulted applications for microfinance, telemedicine, mobile disaster management technoloogies, and rapid pneumonia response systems.


The following is a video highlighting efforts in their project for detection and treatment of cervical cancer.


From their project page

We are developing the process that would facilitate the use of mobile device to transport images taken by nurses at health care centers (point-of-care) in rural Zambia to a server in Lusaka where doctors can access the images in order to provide expert advice on cervical lesions. We would like to explore the use of this approach to facilitate a scalable national cervical cancer screening program. Finally, we would like to design a platform that would allow transfer of the images directly to an electronic medical record database for archiving.

Making sure you eat your Wheaties (and take your meds)

Patient compliance is a $30 billion dollar a year problem according to major pharmaceutical associations (DataMonitor). The challenge is universal, everyone is susceptible to procrastination regardless of GDP. Patient compliance has uneven consequences in different patient populations. We covered a couple of technologies aimed at developing world patients fighting TB. These are low-cost reporting and monitoring technologies that take advantage of widespread cellphone networks. One of the rationales for their use is to prevent the onset of a much more complicated disease. If they become too sick, their public health resources cannot support further treatment.

Closer to these shores, patient compliance takes on a different rationale. Insurers and healthcare sponsors seek savings through preventative medicine.

This has launched what I will term the pillbox technology: simple dispensers that report usage of a dispensing mechanism. Essentially, you get a reminder, a convenient dispensing mechanism, and the time and frequency of the dispensing is reported to a central location. The approach is not limited to pillboxes. It has also been expended to inhalers and glucose meters.

Pillboxes: Gaming the System
A major flaw in this approach is reliance on the Honor System. This is going to make me really unpopular in some circles: trusting on people to behave themselves all on their own is a risky strategy. Some patients require a high level of monitoring to ensure compliance since their life is on the line. Forget about taking your multivitamin everyday (I forget to)---if you don't take your full course of TB meds, you're not going to make it. And if you do, you're going develop multiple drug resistant TB. If you do, and your national healthcare system can't provide, you're not going to make it.

Enter the Adult Supervision Brigades...

The second method goes further and ensures that the medication has actually been taken. We'll call this Detect-and-Report. Detecting metabolized drugs in patients such as University of Florida spinoff Exhale’s breathalyzer technologies enhances compliance by ensuring that drugs have been taken. For some this may be a little too Big Brother, but in the end, one can argue that it’s for your own good. After all, a much higher level of compliance enforcement would be experienced that same patient is hospitalized.

Exhale’s technology is being used to ensure compliance in patients undergoing a HIV/AIDS trials. The noninvasive test relies on adding GRAS (Generally Recognized as Safe) biomarker tags that are detected on an electronic monitor---just like an alcohol breathalyzer. There is no word on pricing, but it could easily pay for itself if can enhance the confidence of a clinical trial.

On the other end of the spectrum of detection-and-monitor technologies is the XoutTB system which I have described earlier. At a cost of a penny a day, the system relies on metabolic testing integrated with a mobile reporting platform.

The recent development of detect-and-report technologies means that the jury is still out on whether the honor system works as well as active detection and reporting systems. We’ll stay tuned.

In the meantime eat your Wheaties, take your statins, and rafampin, and all those little bottles behind the mirror.

More on Exhale in their website.
Stay tuned for information on XoutTB or get in touch with us directly.

Foldit: Competitive Protein Folding

Most of us are familiar with the Fold@Home project that allows millions of computers to share spare computing cycles to solve protein folding problems. If your screensaver is not set to provide Fold@Home some spare computing cycle, you are not alone.
Move aside Celtics: enter the league of Competitive Protein Folding.

The idea behind David Baker's project, called FoldIt is to employ battalions of gamers to provide what an army of CPUs can't: smarts. Algorithms are great, but they can't match the puzzle-solving abilities of a person dead set on solving a problem. Baker would know a thing or two about algorithms. His research launched the Rosetta@Home project which employed distributed computing power to solve proteins.



I like the concept because it combines the flattening power of the internet, the elegance of distributed computing, and a really cool gaming interface. Watch the video.

Innerspace News: Tiny boats delivery meds to your body

This drug delivery method is elegant, it may very make it to the a global health application one day.

Cheng Luo, an engineer from the University of Texas at Arlington, has developed a tiny device that uses differences in the surface tension of to propel it in water. The hope is that one day, they can take the concept and create micro submarines for delivering drugs inside the blood stream.

More at Physorg.com