Off to Malawi!

As I’m writing this, there’s still a huge pile of clothes and miscellaneous supplies that I still need to stuff into suitcases for our long flight to Malawi on Monday. Our nearly 35-hour trip will bring us from Houston through London, England and Johannesburg, South Africa to Lilongwe (the capital of Malawi), where we’ll finally drive to Namitete.

As you probably gathered from the description, Truce, Jesal and I will be traveling to rural Namitete, Malawi for 2 months to test and implement some of Rice’s devices at St. Gabriel’s Hospital, as well as identifying any possible local medical problems that we could bring back to Rice so that a team could develop a solution. I’m also really excited that we’ve been given the freedom to pursue an independent project while there, which could hopefully lay the groundwork for a sustainable solution to a local problem as well as being really fun to implement!

All three of us have been looking forward to finally heading off to Africa, so its beyond thrilling that we’ll be starting to work in the hospital so soon!

Background

Just as a bit of background, Malawi is a small, primarily rural landlocked country in southeast Africa that is often called the “Warm Heart of Africa” for its amiable and easygoing people. While a good portion of the country speaks English (as it was a former British colony), the native language of almost every Malawian is Chichewa. Fun Fact: the (as of a week ago) former president of Malawi, Joyce Banda, was named the most powerful woman in Africa, partly due to her extensive work in developing educational and women’s health resources!

Appropriate Technologies!

For the past couple weeks, we’ve have been busy working in the Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen (OEDK) to prepare several of Rice’s medical technologies to test and implement at St. Gabriel’s Hospital.

One of the exciting things that we’ll be doing this summer is doing a pilot implementation of morphine dosing clips and adapter caps designed by a freshman ENGI 120 group. We made 50 of clips and caps, which are designed to more easily and accurately dose morphine for patients receiving it at home. I’m a huge fan of the design, so I’m excited to see it in the field!

Jesal cracking open an adapter cap mold

All 50 adapter caps!

Truce and I were on a team last semester to develop a low cost, easy to use, liquid crystal thermometer for neonates, which we call LCTemp. We’ve continued to develop it, and we’re pleased to be able to bring it with us to Malawi to perform a small pilot study to evaluate its usability and accuracy. We’re also bringing another neonatal thermometer developed by a different team (the axilla probe thermometer), so we hope to be able to compare/contrast how it’s handled and used in Malawi!

Thermometer accuracy testing: the cool bubbles kept us from getting too bored (its a slow process)

Final Prototypes

We’re bringing several other technologies with us, including a phototherapy calibration device, portable OB-GYN stirrups, an oxygen flow splitter, a neonatal temperature sensor and plans for a sterile processing unit. I’m sure that we’ll be talking about the technologies and other projects that we’ll be pursuing in subsequent blog posts, so stay tuned!