Northwestern students abroad in South Africa are taking on the challenge of developing new medical technologies while contending with daily power outages, scarce money and a lack of workers to repair damaged equipment.
These students are part of the Global Healthcare Technologies program, designed to teach engineering students about working in Third World countries.
“You have to really think quite differently when you’re creating medical devices for those kinds of settings,” said David Kelso, a biomedical engineering professor who is one of two NU professors teaching in the program. “It doesn’t mean that you can’t make equipment that will run there; it just means it has to be designed differently, right from the ground up.”
Much of the equipment used in America is impractical in Africa, Kelso said.
“You walk into any hospital on the continent of Africa, and you’ll see all this donated American equipment stacked up in a corner not working,” he said.
Sam Pickerill, a graduate engineering student, went to South Africa his senior year and again as a graduate student. He said many students discovered the designs they developed at NU wouldnt work in South Africa.
“It gives students a unique experience, not only to see a different part of the world, but to work on projects that improve their capabilities as engineers and designers,” Pickerill said. “That’s the real strength of the classes: teaching engineers how to problem-solve.”
About 20 NU students, mostly seniors, are currently in South Africa. Now in its third year, the program is taught every Spring Quarter in conjunction with the University of Cape Town.
“It’s centered around teaching biomedical engineering design in a resource-limited setting,” Kelso said.
Kelso said the University of Cape Town was chosen because when the program was founded, it had “the only biomedical engineering department on the continent.”.
Several promising designs have come out of the class so far, including a low-cost digital X-ray system that is being installed in township clinics around Cape Town. Kelso said they hope to have the system up and running by August. Other projects in the works include devices to help treat jaundice and sleep apnea in infants.
“We’re also trying to identify some companies in South Africa that could manufacture it once we get the designs worked out,” Kelso said.
Jack Henderson, a McCormick senior, worked on creating the device to help treat sleep apnea, a condition where a person stops breathing momentarily, mostly due to airway obstruction. The disorder is potentially fatal for infants.
“It’s a device that detects whether or not premature infants stop breathing during the night, so that either the mother or attending nurse would be made aware of it and could help get the baby breathing again,” said Henderson, who went to South Africa during his junior year.
As well as designing medical equipment, the students travel to health centers in Cape Town and evaluated the work of local health care professionals, he said.
But designing and developing medical equipment in South Africa is vastly different from what most engineers are accustomed to.
“I think it’s pretty typical of engineering education to use all the resources you have available in a first world country like the United States or Western Europe,” Henderson said. “But in the rest of the world, there are a lot of regions, including South Africa, that do not have as much access to those resources.”
Students on the program are learning “how to design for the entire global population instead of just the first world,” Henderson said.
One of the main points of the program is to design for the real world, Kelso said.
“There’s a chance that we might actually be able to do some good as a result of the classroom exercises,” he said.
