Successful Solutions Abroad

Design for the Developing World

This interview was printed in Abroad View
magazine fall 2006

Northwestern University’s biomedical engineering program is at the forefront of sustainable solutions for the developing world. While similar courses are offered at Stanford, MIT, and Duke, Northwestern was one of the first to offer students the opportunity to work on problems in non-industrialized nations and to travel abroad to implement designs. Closer Look editor Nicole Price Fasig talked with Professor David Kelso to learn about how the effort is going and why courses like this are important to the future of sustainability and global cooperation.

Abroad View: What inspired the biomedical engineering department to create a design course working on solutions for developing countries?

David Kelso: We saw it as an opportunity to inform students about global health challenges and, at the same time, teach them the fundamentals of user-centered design. Most of the major health problems on this planet are not in the industrialized countries. Our life expectancies are now 75-80 years of age. However, in low-income countries, life expectancies are half that. In places like Botswana, Zimbabwe, Malawi, and Zambia, the average person is not expected to live past 40. In many countries, 10 to 15 percent of babies born do not live to their first birthday.

To have an impact bioengineers need to develop medical devices that are affordable and appropriate for the conditions where they will be used. To achieve this, you need to talk with the people in those environments. As inhabitants of the industrialized world, we can’t assume we know anything about what it’s like to live in resource-limited settings. These projects force students to focus on their users and the environment in which their device will be used.

Mike Hoaglin (left) and Aaron Eifler (right) with the X-ray team at Chegutu District Hospital in Zimbabwe.

AV: What has been the student response?

DK: Student response has been terrific. We give them two lists to select from at the start of the class: one with projects relevant to the industrialized world, the other for the developing world. Three-fourths of the students select the latter.

At graduation last June, the biomedical engineering projects swept all three of the Frey Prizes [an honor given out by Northwestern’s engineering school to senior projects that display innovation and creativity]. Two of the three were developing world projects—a rapid, affordable tuberculosis test and a low-cost prosthetic for land-mine victims.

AV: Why is it important for students to visit the countries for which their projects are designed?


DK: The biggest problem is getting firsthand information about the users in the early stages of the design process. There are fairly reliable statistics available from sources like the World Health Organization and UNICEF, but we can’t just walk over to visit the setting where the device will be used.

Another problem is getting feedback from users. After the students develop their design on paper, it’s good practice to show those concepts to a range of users and get their responses. When we are halfway around the world, it’s not easy to sit down with them and show them a foam-core mockup.

AV: How do students overcome challenges they face that are specific to developing countries?

DK: Some students have been very resourceful in contacting people in the countries they’re targeting. They go through charities and organizations like Doctors Without Borders to find people who can tell them what it’s like on the front lines. E-mail is a phenomenal way to communicate. Cell phones are also available in most countries, and we’ve set up a fund so that our students can place calls overseas. The only difficulty with this is the time difference. Students have had to get up at 7 a.m. to talk with a doctor in South Africa at 3 p.m.

One way we’ve solved the problem is by starting up a study abroad program at the University of Cape Town in South Africa. Last spring, we piloted the program with eight students. They worked on four projects which were begun during the winter quarter. Two of the projects progressed exactly as we had anticipated. The students in South Africa were able to visit the sites where the devices would be used, and they got terrific feedback from the target users and other stakeholders.

The other two projects turned out to be case studies in how difficult it is to really understand the product requirements. One of them, a low-cost incubator for premature infants, also taught us a lesson in how people in the developing world can be very creative in solving their own problems. Instead of building temperature controlled boxes for newborns, they bundle the babies to their mothers’ chests with skin-to-skin contact. It turns out that nature has built into mothers an exquisite temperature controller which warms babies when they’re cold, and cools them when they’re hot. They had a better solution than we did. The only cost was a wrap around cloth, and knitted caps and booties to reduce heat loss to the head and feet. In the other case, we had designed a complex computerized medical record system when all they needed was a fingerprint scanner to identify patients.

AV: How will students use what they learn in this course in their future careers?

DK: The most important lesson is to understand the people and the place where your design will be used. That applies to both the industrialized and the developing world. There’s also a chance that some of our graduates will be able to convince their future employer or investor to go into these markets. It would benefit the world tremendously and it may be a way to grow an existing business or start a new venture.