MEDIKit: DIY Technologies for Health
The core impact of this project stems from developing the design kits as a platform technology. Modular components allow medical professionals to design their own appropriate solutions that are more useful and sustainable to physicians and patients. Given the appropriate tools and the right context set by the course, MEDIKit users are empowered to innovate and address the unique challenges in their work environment.
The MEDIKits span six areas of technology: drug delivery, diagnostics, microfluidics, prosthetics, vital signs and surgical devices. The kits contain a combination of medical device parts coded with a language of design, platform technologies that can be adapted, such as handheld microscopes, and materials to build and modify devices.
Our research into user-enabled medical prototyping continues at the lab. We are keenly interested in understanding the effects of shifting the power from the { expert + regulator } and sharing it with everyday { doctors + nurses + users } to make more transparent and accessible designs.
Viral Diagnostics
In collaboration with Gehrke Lab at MIT IMES and the Hammad-Schifferly group at UMass Boston, we are developing a series of multiplexed diagnostics for fever viruses such as dengue, ebola, zika and chikungunya. View our newest paper in the September 2017 Issue of Science Translational Medicine.
Open Access Diagnostics
Rapid diagnostic fabrication can be obscure in lab practice and may involve expensive biological assays and methods. We are create an open access distribution of our diagnostic devices so that anyone, anywhere in the world with access and the need for patient care can develop their own paper devices.