This past week has been busy and all over the place, but not in a bad way. Early in the week we presented the device prototypes we brought from Rice to Rice 360 staff, students at the Polytechnic working on medical devices themselves, the Rice Dean of Engineering as well as USAID staff! We got amazing feedback from everyone there and people loved the work that was being done. My favorite part was learning about the projects being developed there, some examples were central patient monitoring systems for hospitals, phototherapy lights for jaundice in newborns and more. A very interesting project I hope to work with a bit more that was being developed at the Polytechnic was an autonomous drone that can be used to deliver food to remote villages with little access to food. The students built the entire drone from scratch. It is very inspiring and motivating seeing students at the Polytechnic build and design these devices, they most often have less resources than we may have at Rice but build such novel and impactful devices, it really shows me how your work is really dependent on your ethic and not your situation.

Later during the week we visited district hospitals, which are smaller hospitals that are government funded and closer to villages. The standard of care at these locations is enlightening, they sometimes use technology that to a westerner is outdated and sometimes old fashioned but is the norm in these locations. A lot of the problems they face in caring for the patients are simple to fix, but only in theory, such as more tools to monitor patients. But the underlying issue is that this costs the hospital a significant amount of money that they sometimes do not have. We did see the Pumani bCPAP devices in each of these hospitals being used actively! This device is incredibly helpful for infants with mild to severe respiratory problems. The nurses love the machine and it is nice to see the impact it has on the patients. The visits to these hospitals makes me glad that I am part of the Rice 360 team working to design low cost devices aimed at ending preventable deaths.

These visits also showed me how important it is to make implementation and training an integral part of introducing a device into a clinical setting. This is something that was not very obvious before but after visiting nursery and maternity wards is very apparently important.

This coming week we will begin our work with our fellow interns from the Polytechnic, I have been looking forward to this for a long time and it is about to begin! I think the projects I’m most interested in are the central patient monitoring systems and the autonomous drone delivery device.

–franklin–