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l*******d
发帖数: 572 | 1 Have you gotten caught up in the endless healthcare debate that can lead to
comparing our healthcare system with France, the UK, or even Cuba? Our work
in medical device research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has
pointed to healthcare lessons in unexpected places: Nicaragua, Nigeria,
Ethiopia, and even suburban hacker spaces in America. What they have in
common is their development of do-it-yourself (DIY) medical technology.
We are and have always been a nation of makers. Along the way, someone told
us that healthcare technology was off the table. But we have the technology,
the hardware, and the prototyping resources to change that and bring down
healthcare costs. Now, we have to recruit everyday inventors that are not
part of the conventional “medical industrial complex” - the types of
inventors we find all over the developing world, saving lives every day.
Think about your daily interactions with medical technology: Have you ever
to replaced your glucometer strips without prescription insurance ($80),
bought an asthma inhaler in cash ($100), or walked out of the emergency room
wondering type of engineering marvel causes crutches to cost as much $170?
These are frequent characters in the day in the life of our healthcare
system. We spend approximately 17% of our GDP in healthcare. Shinier medical
devices and newer medications can offer improved outcomes, but they
represent a primary contributor to rising costs according to Medicare. The
Congressional Budget Office published a report last year that points a
pricier-is-better mentality when it comes to medical care. We are in an
upwards costs spiral.
Our Little Devices group at MIT has logged thousands of miles to find and
empower individuals in places that simply cannot afford this spiral. Instead
of charity and aid, they resort to invention. We call them “MacGyver
nurses and doctors”: men and women with everyday medical inventions in
hospital wards in some the poorest places in the world.
Unlike our modern day American Edison’s, they shy away from showing off
their inventions, embarrassed by the prototyping hack. They lack the stature
to publish in meaningful journals, and they are left out of the
conversation that dictates what medical equipment looks like. So we give
them tools that include toy helicopters, Lego blocks, engineering couplings,
and a variety of biosensors that add to up something called MEDIKits. These
erector sets for medical technology aim to democratize the invention
process in healthcare.
We’re now excited about bringing that process back home. It represents the
convergence of a growing “maker sector” and the increasing costs of
medical technologies. It’s an exciting clash where DIYers can offer their
inventive nature to a healthcare sector that is desperately in need of being
more lean. The lean healthcare research and development infrastructure
means that your engineering supply shop is replaced by your corner toy store
; your chemicals can often be harvested from your pharmacy; and the
thousands of app developers dedicated to the next social network can pay
more attention to clinical apps.
Washington, healthcare management consultants and systems experts are
striving to come up with more models that make sense of a broken system. At
Little Devices group, we propose models where more communities can come
together to create devices that you can hold in your hand, that can heal and
that you can invent. We have healthcare workers who need the tools that can
empower them to invent. We have a Maker movement that can be inspired to
unleash their creative power towards health. And we have patients who need
to be confident that they can have more participatory role in creative
devices, in selecting ones which make financial sense, and calling out
bloated prices when they can become more informed how their inner workings
function.
An injection of DIY medical technology in our system allows asthma patients
to have $10 nebulizers powered by bike pumps, $20 digital scales that SMS
your weight to a doctor (instead of $200), and rapid diagnostics that are
modular, selective, and affordable through paper tests that are reasonable
and not bundled with machines that costs thousands of dollars. Our research
shows that DIY medical technology can be empowered through communities that
share toolkits and processes. Not everyone can go back to engineering,
medical and design school. Think of Legos and your favorite construction set
. Your prototypes have components that form languages of design. They have
limits to the versatility thanks to the degrees of freedom of the
construction. And they are invariably hacked by power users which leads to
breakthrough inventions. These elements can create conversations between
communities not just in the digital world, but the analog world.
After all, whether we are inventors are patients or both, we are analog,
just like a toy helicopter or your next DIY medical hack. |
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