ETHIOPIA: March 2020

Arduino Workshop

During our week in Ethiopia, we conducted a daily Arduino workshop with the biomedical technician students that rotate through the Biomedical workshop at St. Paul’s. Arduino is a microcontroller and prototyping platform that can be coded and utilized in a myriad of medical applications, such as patient monitors. 

We donated 13 Arduino kits to the biomedical workshop in hopes that the students and technicians would continue to use and learn from the Arduino kits to develop more and more complex circuits that could eventually be used in medical applications, specifically in designing and creating medical devices. The workshops strive to convey general engineering principles and tools so the students can apply their knowledge to repairing the medical devices and develop new devices to fit their needs. Most of the devices they receive are not made to function in their country, since they do not have the same resources as the countries donating the equipment, such as stable power and proper outlets. 

Surgical Lamp Prototype

Why a surgical lamp? 

The surgical lamps currently being used at St. Paul’s rely on halogen bulbs, which are particularly expensive to import (they are not manufactured anywhere on the African continent) and have short life-spans. In fact, the engineers stated that they spent at least one day every week in the OR repairing the lamps and replacing bulbs. We observed that at any one time, most of the lamps in the OR were actually operating with half the necessary number of bulbs due to procurement difficulties. With these constraints in mind, the IGH design team tackled designing a functional LED surgical lamp prototype that the engineers and technicians in the Biomedical Engineering Workshop at St. Paul’s would be able to recreate utilizing resources and materials available in Addis Ababa. 

Needs Assessment

• We interviewed clinicians and technicians across various departments

Future Potential Projects:

• Telemetry

• Portable PulseOx kits (Capstone Project in progress)

• Glucometer/test strips

• Suction machine

• ECG Electrodes (selected design project)