Little Devices That Could

Thursday, March 22, 2007

Event alert: Learn about IP today

From Young Inventor's International

Join YII online for the Intellectual Property for Start-Ups webinar with Suvashis Bhattacharya of Thelen Reid Brown Raysman & Steiner (Silicon Valley) on Thursday, March 22nd, 6 - 7 PM EST.

More at YII

Sunday, March 18, 2007

Muletas de Cartulina

Cardboard crutches are Michael Joynt's answer to expensive crutches found in most hospitals. His design costs roughly 2.75 pounds and is made of

convolute cardbored cores wrapped in Poly Propelene plastic and rubber pushlift parts

I wonder if this is the same stuff found in the cores of fax spools and such...would that be strong enough? These cores can be pretty tough...other's like Japan's Shigeru Ban have made houses and other structures. What else can you come up with?

Wednesday, March 14, 2007

Neglected Diseases Week on NPR

NPR is featuring a series on neglected diseases all week long.
If you missed on the radio, you can listen online.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=7810374

The latest story is about Dr. Ben Richards, an infectious disease specialist who has worked in underdeveloped areas for the last 25 years.

Friday, March 9, 2007

AIDG's Technology Sourcebook

The good people at the Appropriate Infrastrucure Technology Group (AIDG) have a section on their website that I hadn't run into, AIDG.net. It's an excellent source of appropriate technology sources, and even files on their own technology. Now I know where to get that bidirectional satelite broadband internet system for rural telepathology.

Wednesday, March 7, 2007

Young Inventors International

The tinkerers out there will like this post. Innovators, inventors, scientists, thought leaders, business and social entrepreneurs are part of the network and organization known as Young Inventors International. I am rarely a fan of entrepreneurship centers or conferences because they often hype up what is possible into empty motivational talks.

This group is totally different.

Hype and excitement are replaced by thoughtful observation, intelligent feedback, and constant support and education. Just the kind of support you need to look around, plan a strategy and ramp up your project. It's the only support group of its kind that combines entrepreneurship + invention + social return in everything they do.

I can't say enough good things about this invention powerhouse. They offer an array of resources for those of us who are into product development and entrepreneurship. They have real guidance on starting taking your product from idea, to invention, to product, to business. There's no hidden agenda. The non-profit organization's focus is You, Inventor.

This is not your average entrepreneurship center. Anne Swift, the founder of YII, has a talent for finding and connecting people cutting across a wide array of fields. I've met friends working on collaborative software, solar-powered trash compactors, explosive tracking RFIDs, distributed hybrid transportation systems, and portable ice technology (I know ice is portable...you had to be there). I have gotten help from hand picked veteran medical device designers, international technology transfer experts, business people, attorneys...the list is long.

Coming up this month

March 22, 2007 6 PM - 7 PM EST
Intellectual Property Basics Webinar
Suvashis Bhattacharya, Thelen Reid Brown Raysman & Steiner

and you just missed an excellent talk on outsourced manufacturing opportunities.

Tons more info at http://www.younginventorsinternational.com

Sunday, March 4, 2007

Social Enterprise Conference today at HBS

I totally wanted to go this and I totally forgot to register!

Tough week.

Anyways, I know some of you may be going, so take notes, blog, send me your ~~bootleg tapes~~ podcasts, anything...

The schedule seems to be interesting. Speakers include Victoria Hale and David Gergen.

There's going to be a career fair, a Pitch for Change competition, and 18 different panels.

I'm so bummed.

Saturday, March 3, 2007

News from Proto, courtesy of Mass General Hospital

I didn't have to far for this one: Proto, the quarterly from my hometown's own Mass General Hospital, has some great medical articles. They cover some of the best medicine in the country, cutting edge technology, and policy with a refreshing worldly outlook. They also have some awesome graphics.

A quick rundown of the last 3 issues that LDTC likes:

An interview with Dr. Kenneth Kamler on Extreme Doctoring---one moment you're in Nepal and in Mars the next:

Q: You wrote a book called Surviving the Extremes: A Doctor’s Journey to the Limits of Human Endurance. Do people who live their entire lives in extreme environments have different expectations of medical science than we do?

A: They don’t expect nearly as much. They’re accepting of injury and illness: If they fail to produce, they become a burden on their family and their village. I knew a Sherpa who worked for two years with a dislocated ankle. He had to—otherwise his family would have starved.

Q: What are the biggest obstacles to treating an astronaut injured on the moon—or Mars?

A: The time delay—the time it takes to transmit across vast distances. It’s not a huge issue with telemedicine, but for remote surgery it’s hard to see how the problem can be overcome. A surgeon, working remotely, can tie a suture with a two-second delay. With a three-second delay, hand-eye coordination is no longer possible; because neural circuits work on immediate feedback, it would be like trying to drive a car by looking out the back window. The time delay on the moon is 2.5 seconds. On Mars it’s 20 to 40 minutes.

Q: How does NASA envision solving that problem?

A: Surgery would have to be pre-programmed, as in a player piano. Magnetic resonance images would be radioed back to Earth and analyzed. Then doctors would figure out the operation needed, program it into a computer and send the information to a robotic surgeon on Mars. That’s the only way it could be done—unless you can speed up the speed of light!

Fall 2006 coverage of Tech for Developing World:

A wearable malaria monitor that that doubles as a wristwatch to test for Maria 4 times a day.

A lab-on-a-chip developed in Spain that can detect tuberculosis and other infectious diseases using technology that checks out the DNA chain of each disease.

Fall 2005: The fablab helps on maxillofacial surgery patients in Iraq:

A young victim of a bomb blast in Baghdad arrives at a U.S. army hospital requiring facial reconstruction. Surgeons upload data from scans of the boy's skull into a 3-D laser printer, which produces a ceramic bone substitute of his jaw within hours. Known as additive fabrication, or rapid prototyping, the process—in which cross-sections of liquid, powder or sheet materials are fused into objects of ceramic, plastic and metal—is used to create prosthetic devices and models of organs, joints and bones. Recently, surgeons in Dallas used a model (above) of a conjoined skull, replicating bone structure and vasculature, to guide them in separating twins.

I recently learned that Aerovax was nominated for this year's Tech Museum Awards in the Health category. Of course, our team is thrilled and humbled that someone out there thinks so highly of our project. Stay tuned and cross your fingers for us! And a big thanks for the person(s) that nominated us!

From their website:

The Tech Museum Awards is an international Awards program that honors innovators from around the world who are applying technology to benefit humanity.

The Tech Awards program inspires global engagement in applying technology to humanity's most pressing problems by recognizing the best of those who are utilizing innovative technology solutions to address the most urgent critical issues facing our planet. People all over the world are profoundly improving the human condition in the areas of education, equality, environment, health, and economic development through the use of technology. It is the goal of The Tech Awards to showcase their compelling stories and reward their brilliant accomplishments.

Each year, candidates are nominated and then invited to submit applications. Individuals, for-profit companies, and not-for-profit organizations are eligible. International panels of judges review the applications and annually select 25 Laureates. Awards are presented in five categories: Health, Education, Environment, Economic Development, and Equality.

More from the Tech Museum Awards site

Be the engine, be the fuel

The Human Powered Workshop featured a number of projects whose fuel source is you. I am a huge fan of these machines and applications --- sometimes you can get something Rube Goldberg would have been impressed with and sometimes you an very elegant approaches.

When I think human-powered an image of someone cycling away comes to mind. These folks have taken things many steps further:

A Street Cleaner: the Dirt Anhilator

A Milk Warmer---(of course)

In 2005, the MIT based project, Bicilavadora won the MIT IDEAS competition with their cycle-powered machine to replace the old stone-and-river method used in many places around the world.

More at WorldChanging

and if you're into building this stuff Instructables has some great projects as well as Howtopedia, Appropedia, and Maya pedal.

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.