Last week, we told you about a Johns Hopkins contest to design better personal protective gear for doctors and nurses to use when treating Ebola patients.
This wasn’t one of those hypothetical design challenges; the problem posed by Ebola is alarmingly real. “We organized this event with the utmost sense of urgency, from concept to event in less than 10 days,” Added Youseph Yazdi, executive director of the JHU Center for Biomedical Innovation & Design, told the Hopkins Hub. “The entire event is focused on developing creative new solutions that can be manufactured and in the field in a matter of months, not years.”
And so the group of doctors, engineers, designers, and other smart folks managed to come up with four ideas that garnered $25,000 in seed money for further development. They include extremely low-cost gear for people taking care of sick family members at home; methods for cooling personal protective equipment, so users can keep them on longer; and ways to remove that equipment more quickly and safely.
“Seeing so many smart and creative people working so hard to develop new solutions was truly impressive,” Adam Kushner, an associate at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health who has worked in West Africa, told the Hub. “I am very confident that what was started this weekend will eventually be used to protect health care workers globally and save lives.”
