Posts by Anna Young
July 1, 2009
Lori Hanna was interviewed by Nancy Scola of WorldChanging.com to describe the solar autoclave and the application to rural clinics in undeserved areas. The article highlights the solar autoclave for Nicaragua and FrontlineSMS:Medic of Malawi, Africa as two examples of social innovations that are closing the gaps in healthcare delivery.
Two projects led by US students and their international allies are helping to fill gaps in health care gaps in the Global South. Though one project involves cell phone text messaging and the other equipment sterilizers powered by the sun, they have the same inspiration: using simple technology to build on the value of existing social capital.
These innovations are developing in Malawi and Nicaragua, both counted amongst the all-too-many places on the globe where the holes in the net of public health are so gaping that many people slip right through. Numbers tell that story. Of the fifty thousand Malawians who contracted tuberculousis last year, for example, an estimated 70% of them are also carry HIV. And that’s just a small portion those with HIV; nearly one million of Malawi’s 14 million people are infected. Yet in all of the country, there are just 250 or so doctors. Nicaragua is somewhat better off, yet nearly half of all of births happen there with no medical professional in attendance. Into those breaches have, in many cases, stepped community health workers (CHWs), local laypeople who work with the local health care system, often as volunteers. The two projects profiled here are equipping those CHWs with simple, appropriate ways to shrink the holes in their country’s health care nets.
You can read more of the article at the Worldchanging website, http://www.worldchanging.com/archives//010007.html
WorldChanging.com is a nonprofit media organization headquartered in Seattle, WA, that comprises a global network of independent journalists, designers and thinkers. We cover the world’s most innovative solutions to the planet’s problems, and inspire readers around the world with stories of new tools, models and ideas for building a bright green future. We have brought awareness to issues like refugee aid, renewable energy and innovative solutions for improving building, transportation, communication and quality of life. Our readers are ready to change the world, and Worldchanging connects them with the latest ideas on how to do that.
April 29, 2009
Below are the three largest challenges faced by the design clinic team in developing a design for the solar autoclave. We welcome you to contribute your thoughts and suggestions to these challenges in the comments section!
Pressure Release Valve
The team wanted to build the pressure release valve of easily-found materials, however each of their designs proved to be too insensitive. In the end, the team decided to use the release valve off of a commercial pressure cooker. Fortunately, these are available to purchase without requiring the purchase of a whole pressure cooker. Its precisely machined weight and aperture is necessary.
Sterilization Indicator
For much of the semester, the team worked to improve a cylinder/washer design, in which a small plastic cylinder would be filled with a phase-change material, Polywax2000 and a washer. The idea is that the washer starts on top of the solid wax, but as the autoclave heats up and the wax melts, the washer moves to the bottom. There is a calculated amount of wax inside such that when the washer lies on the bottom (i.e. all of the wax has melted), at least 15 minutes have passed, the minimum for sterilizing surgical instruments at 121 degrees Celsius and 15 psig. Ultimately, this design was abandoned because too much pressure built up inside the cylinder.
The final design is a two-compartment cylinder, with one compartment filled with Polywax2000. It functions as does an hourglass, and is manufactured such that when all of the wax melts and flows into the bottom compartment, the solar autoclave operator can rest assured that sterilization is complete. It has a hole in both ends, for ventilation, and a cap that blocks the whole at the bottom.
This design requires further testing, so the team also offered a contingency plan-an electronic timer, using a thermistor and powered by a small solar cell. Currently, the price of one sterilization indicator stands at $2.00, which complies with the team’s goal of under $10 if reusable and about $0.01 if non-reusable.
Pressure Vessel
For the solar autoclave pressure vessel, the team has replaced one of the wooden end caps with an aluminum end cap, used a silicone pie pan as the seal, and used hex bolts with wing nuts to hold it all together. Upon testing with hydraulic oil, they successfully brought the pressure up to 32psig – well above the 15psig required for sterilization – before it started to leak at the seal again. The stresses were well below the yield strength for the can. It is currently thought that the leaking seal, once validation testing is complete, could provide the emergency safety release, because it always fails well above the operating pressure, but fails before rupture of the vessel.
Testing with air revealed that the prototype does not consistently maintain pressure-so, tests run in an oven were not able to achieve 15psi because the system is not completely air tight. Further development is necessary to ensure a good seal. The oven testing also revealed that the time to heat up is very lengthy, but that steps can be taken to decrease this time, such as adding already-boiling water in the autoclave instead of cold water.
April 27, 2009
Here’s your chance to learn how to make a solar box cooker using locally available materials! Dr. Richard Komp will be teaching a one-day course at the Woodstock Museum in New York on May 17th. The cost of the course is $25 and includes a power point presentation and lunch. Registration is limited, click here, to RSVP and for more information.
April 20, 2009
Earlier this month, I had the opportunity to represent Salud del Sol at International Development Night at MIT Museum (ID Night), a precursor to the International Development Conference held at Harvard Kennedy School. ID Night was an opportunity for different organizations from the MIT and Harvard community to showcase their projects of International Development, Salud del Sol was partnered with Innovations in International Health. Conference participants, students and community members stopped by our poster to learn about the solar autoclave research, business model of Salud del Sol and Las Mujeres Solares, and to offer their insight. It was energizing to hear the interest of others, and also to bring their suggestions back to the Salud del Sol team for further thought.
I also had a chance to talk with a few of the other organizations at the event, including Amy Quin, from One Earth Designs, an innovative organization focused on developing culturally appropriate sources of alternative energy. At the International Development night, Amy was presenting a parabolic cooker being developed for villages in western China.
April 20, 2009
This academic year, a team of undergraduate engineers from University of Dayton School of Engineering Design Clinic class, have been researching a system design for the solar autoclave. Their design includes, the solar box cooker, a pressure vessel, and a sterilization indicator. The progress of this team has been incredible!
Friday, April 24 at 8:00am in the Kettering Labs Building at the University of Dayton, the design clinic team will be presenting a culmination of the research. They will also be setting forth future research plans for Daniel Hensel and the field team to implement this summer in Nicaragua. For more information about this presentation, please email daniel.hensel@saluddelsol.org.
April 20, 2009
Earlier this month, Lori Hanna had the opportunity to attend the Global Engagement Summit at Northwestern University on behalf of Salud del Sol, Inc. As you can tell from reading her blog postings, it was an incredible experience, full of personal and organizational growth and an inspiration for us to continue the work of Salud del Sol!
An exciting outcome of the Global Engagement Summit is the GlobalGiving Project Challenge. Sponsored by the GlobalGiving Foundation, the Project Challenge competition gives students two weeks to try to raise at least $4,000 from 50 donors. Organizations that reach $4,000 are allowed to keep their projects on the site to continue to raise funds. The top three projects also receive bonuses totaling $6,000. The Project Challenge is held from April 17 – May 8.
Salud del Sol is incredibly excited and honor to be participating in the GlobalGiving project challenge! The funds raised from this endeavor will support the field research of the solar autoclave this summer in Sabana Grande, Nicaragua. The field team this summer has an incredible opportunity to prototype and test the system design from that the UD Design Clinic team has developed. The research plans for this summer also include, capacity building classes for Las Mujeres Solares on the research and testing of the solar autoclave, as well as classes in marketing and entrepreneurship. Also, once testing has proven the solar autoclave design successful, we will be enlisting the support of local doctors from Nicaragua to begin clinical testing of the solar autoclave to guarantee pathogens are eliminated from the instruments, ensuring complete sterilization.
Please visit our GlobalGiving project page to learn more about how you can support the solar autoclave research this summer!
April 8, 2009
From April 8 -12, Lori Hanna, Salud del Sol Executive Director, will be attending the Global Engagement Summit (GES), held at Northwestern University in Chicago, Illinois. GES is a conference held for selected global change leaders from around the world with the mission to “build the capacity of the next generation of global change leaders to cross borders and partner with new communities to produce responsible, innovative, sustainable solutions to shared global problems.”
GES is an incredible opportunity for Lori and Salud del Sol, with a focus on building the capacity of organization leaders to implement on the ground, international development endeavors. Check back for more information about Lori’s experience at GES!
April 6, 2009
Daniel Hensel, Salud del Sol Director of Product Research, will be presenting the research of the solar autoclave at the Appropriate Technology Expo of the University of Denver, held this Wednesday April 8, 2009 from 11:00am -2:00pm in the Driscoll Student Center of the campus. The expo features groups that are using and developing appropriate technologies in the fields of energy, water, agriculture, and health. The goal of the expo is to demonstrate how these technologies are being incorporated into design and implementation to help aid developing nations and improve the quality of life for people all over the world.
Daniel will be presenting the solar autoclave research at 11:10am.
For more information about the Appropriate Technology Expo, contact Kelly Bienhoff, kellybienhoff@gmail.com.
March 24, 2009
The past week, I had the opportunity to attend classes and speakers for an innovative course at MIT, D-Lab Health, taught by professor Jose Gomez-Marquez, who is also the program director of the Innovations for International Health (IIH) initiative. The multi-disciplinary course focuses on understanding global health challenges and designing medical technologies for these challenges through the lenses of engineering, physics, chemistry, biology, and economics.
The D-Lab Health class is very similar to the ETHOS course offered at UD, so it has been enlightening to see how a different University teaches students about the philosophy of appropriate technology in developing countries. My personal interest in global health and work with Salud del Sol make this class a perfect opportunity to learn from other students and professionals in the field and coincidentally, the D-Lab Health class is working with partner organizations in Nicaragua!
I spoke with Jose and his co-worker from IIH, Amit Srivastava about the scope of the field of global health. There are many pieces to issues of global health, including the large scale burden of the lack of infrastructure, the brain drain of medical professionals from developing countries to the US, poor training for community health workers, and the lack of appropriate diagnostic equipment. D-Lab Health educates students on the larger picture of challenges in global health, and then applies this knowledge to the research and design of innovative solutions to address these challenges.
During the classes that I was able to attend last week, the students were learning about complex medical devices, such as ultrasound machines and optometry instruments. The students were tasked with evaluating how these product designs could be altered to be more appropriate for use in developing countries, by asking questions about the parameters of the product design such as the cost of replaceable pieces and the training is required to use the devices.
Another class with D-Lab Health involved a trip to the Operating Room of Shriner’s Children’s Hospital, to experience the conditions of an operating room in a developed country. This trip at the OR gave a point of reference to compare the resource deprived healthcare settings of developing countries.
This week, the D-Lab Health students are traveling to Nicaragua to observe healthcare workers and patients in a field assessment of the challenges in health care equipment and delivery that these professionals face on a daily basis. The students will be bringing these challenges back to the D-Lab for the remaining part of the semester to develop a medical technology kit to address some of the underlying issues that the discover within the clinics. They will be traveling to different locations around the country, including Ocotal! Over the weekend, I was able to talk with the students and Jose about my experience living in Nicaragua last summer, everything from practical financial and travel advice to not leaving the country with out trying ron con pasas ice cream from the Eskimo man and having a cup of coffee from locals. Essential for truly experiencing the culture!
D-Lab Health branches from the over arching D-Lab course of MIT, which uses engineering design principals to improve the lives of the bottom billion in developing countries. Along with attending the D-Lab Health courses last week, I was also able to participate in a product design review for the D-Lab class. It was a brainstorming session for students working on a range of products, including a chlorine dispenser, a cell phone enabled baby scle, a portable hydro powered lantern, an energy storage solution for communities in Tibet,a strong maker to recycle plastic bags, and an interlocking stabilized soil block maker.
March 18, 2009
Tonight, March 18, Innovations for International Health (IIH) is hosting a lecture by Ryan Scott Bardsley, Systems Manager at the CIMIT Simulation Group at Mass General Hospital and researcher at IIH.
His lecture, “Medical Simulation and Training for the Developing World” will explore the convergence of open-source architectures, micro-controllers, pervasive connectivity, and affordable fabrication technologies that are poised to introduce medical simulation into poor countries. Leveraging systems he has developed for the U. S. Army for the past 10 years, he will discuss how a well-designed simulation infrastructure can serve as a powerful platform for deploying medical expertise, assessing provider competency, and adapting training resources to meet local medical needs. Medical simulation will be the fourth computing revolution to hit global health on the heels of low-cost computing, wireless telecommunications, and medical information systems.
The lecture will be held from 6:00-7:30pm at the MIT Museum, located at 265 Massachusetts Ave in Cambridge, MA. For more information, please contact jfgm@mit.edu.
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