Jose
Gomez-Marquez
Little Devices Lab at MIT
Plenary
Lecturer sponsored by
the HHMI Undergraduate Program
Thursday,
August 8, 2013
Clayton
Hall, University of Delaware
Hacker
Nurses, Legos, and the Road to Construction Sets for Health
Construction Sets for Health are part of a family of
enabling technologies
for health and wellness. They aim to radically redefine our
relationship with
devices that we use to heal, into ones we can also learn to invent.
Dengue
Diagnostic Legos, arbitraging global supply chains for instrumentation,
and crowdsourced epidemiology of
tuberculosis and infectious
diseases are some of the resulting research areas that we have
generated when
medical device design is brought out of its engineering black box.
In the developing world 90% of medical devices are
donated. Here, we hunt
for the stealth ingenuity that local healthcare workers use to solve
everyday
technology challenges. We learn from their approaches, explore ways to
nurture
their creativity and create affordable toolsets that lower the barriers
of
medical technology prototyping.
Our diagnostics transfer the capability to effectively
self-report the
disease burden across patient levels. For individuals, we designed
behavioral
diagnostics, a combination of verifiable interactive rapid tests and
behavioral
rewards in order to increase adherence to long term antibiotics, such
as
anti-tuberculosis drugs and chronic disease prescriptions. At the
systems
level, we are decentralizing disease surveillance by creating
machine-readable
immunoassays for the real-time epidemiology of dangerous pathogens such
as
dengue, Ebola, listeria and neglected tropical diseases.
To inspire inventing learning and fabrication in healthcare settings, we created the MEDIKit project — a series of construction sets for medical prototyping. Reconfigurable building blocks enable doctors, nurses, and patients to construct drug delivery systems, modular lateral flow immunoassays, low cost microfluidics and other basic instrumentation.