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Student Invention Deployed In Haiti To Save Lives
While many MIT students busily build break-dancing robots or websites that let your pets network better at doggie daycare, PhD candidate Danielle Zurovcik has designed a $3 pump to drastically speed up the healing of countless patients in the aftermath of Haiti’s recent earthquake.
Popular Science magazine reports that the device simplifies and lightens a common piece of medical equipment called a negative-pressure pump.
Used to accelerate wound healing and reduce the frequency that bandages need to be changed, even the most portable of these pumps costs $100 a day to rent, and weighs 10 pounds with batteries.
The pump Zurovcik invented costs $3 total, weighs less than half a pound, uses only 14 microwatts of power, and can be charged with a hand pump.
The pump works by sucking bacteria and fluids out of a wound, and by encouraging healing blood flow.
Inspired by a toilet plunger, Zurovcik’s device consists of nothing more than a bellows pump, a plastic tube, and a fitting that covers the wound or amputation site.
Photo by Technology Review.
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sanud002 on March 25th, 2010 11:32 am
$3 and designed off the fundamentals of a toilet plunger? Now that is creativity! It goes to show you what a little forward thinking can to do potentially save thousands of lives. I recently saw an video that reminded me much of the same concept. It was about how doctors and scientists figured out how to treat wounds by printing new skin with ink jet printers! This one really blew my mind. I’ll post a link cause you have to see this process to believe it. I guess sometimes the most common everyday objects like a toilet plunger, ink jet printer or if you get hit on the head with a falling apple, can inspire some of the the greatest feats of human ingenuity.
http://www.ndep.us/LabTV2.aspx?id=27&t=Printing%20New%20Skin
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