Peter Semmelhack, of Bug Labs, on “Hacking Health”
"I believe we need an open source movement dedicated to health care. In essence, I want to rally the same fanatical zeal that has helped build some of the best, most complex software systems (LAMP, etc) ever devised to help address some of the world's thorniest health care problems."
Peter Semmelhack
http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2009/07/peter_semmelhack_of_bug_labs_on_hac.html
7 steps for building low cost open source technologies for global health
David Van Sickle, PhD, (http://www.davidvansickle.com) is a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health and Society Scholar at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a friend to Global Health Ideas. He is the founder of Reciprocal Sciences LLC (http://reciprocalsciences.com), which specializes in the development of innovative public health tools and services. He kindly contribued this post to GHI which was posted on the PopTech blog a couple weeks ago.
1. Aggregate information on open hardware projects in global health to maximize participation and activity.
2. Involve students eager to learn and apply their skills to real-world health problems.
3. Develop innovative funding strategies that anticipate sizable requirements and unique opportunities.
4. Broaden participation to create non-obvious but essential project scaffolding.
5. This includes regulatory affairs.
6. Create global health technology incubators to advise and fund open hardware projects.
7. Help teams build and appropriately license solutions that are defensible against infringement claims.
His post in Global Health Ideas on building low cost open source health technologies suggest these seven steps:
Read the entire article here.
The jfish project
The jfish project seeks to encourage the use and development of free anaesthetic monitoring technologies. Their goal is to produce free and open technology to provide safe and reliable anaesthetic monitoring anywhere in the world the need exists.
Stage 2 of the jfish project is complete, with the research, design and construction of a free hardware/open source peripheral nerve stimulator (PNS). Version 1 of the jfish PNS is a standalone battery-powered device suitable for monitoring neuromuscular blockade in a developing world setting. The open design allows for easy addition of extra functionality and integration with other systems as desired.
http://www.jfish.org/doku.php