Designing Medical Technology for the Developing World

Our goal is to develop healthcare solutions that can be implemented in developing countries to reduce their dependence on donated medical equipment. We have focused on several devices: a monitor for premature babies, a bacterial sensor for infection diagnoses and water testing, and an infant automated breathing bag device to maintain breathing in newborns. Our designs minimize the use of consumables and provide better detection and/or treatment than currently available in-country. The baby monitor detects skin temperature and controls an electric warming blanket. The bacterial sensor quickly detects the bacteria in a sample without the need for lengthy culture times. The infant breathing device provides regular breathing support to newborns, relieving family from having to manually support breathing. All of our projects seek to answer critical medical needs in developing regions through reductions in costs, time, or both. Our group is partnering with local governments in Tanzania and Mexico to collaborate on our projects and work to accomplish the specific needs of these communities. These projects are partially supported by the Creative Inquiry program

Design considerations for prosthetic knees in Developing countries

Thesis (S.B.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Mechanical Engineering, 2009.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (p. 24-25).Introduction: The design of prosthetic limbs is a complicated problem that continues to receive significant attention in research labs and in industry throughout the world. The idea of getting a machine to match human performance is an enticing one, and thus research continues to pursue the challenge of designing devices that can replace the functionality lost via limb amputation. Designers of prosthetics for developing countries face similar challenges. However, that challenge is also supplemented with a number of other contextual factors and considerations that must be made as a designer. As described by Cummings', these factors are social, economic, cultural, and geographic, and also include locally available forms of technology and time and distance constraints. These considerations further complicate the design process, especially for an engineer inexperienced with designing for the developing world and unfamiliar with the specific developing world environment being designed for. These topics have been covered in bits and pieces throughout the literature; this document attempts to cover them all thoroughly and in a logical way. This thesis also aims to provide some mechanism by which the challenge of designing a prosthetic knee for the developing world can be broken down and tackled effectively to yield an appropriate knee design. As amputees in the developing world are often subject to an inescapable life of poverty because they are unable to work and support their families, there is a strong impetus to design effective limbs for this population. This document intends to help facilitate that process. This thesis is inspired by a prosthetic knee design project that began in the class Developing World Prosthetics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in its inaugural term, spring 2008. Though the project was successful in many ways, the design process maybe could have been more effective with a stronger foundation in all the areas that will be covered below. This thesis primarily uses literature review to provide insight into human gait and amputee characteristics, as well as developing world considerations for designers of prosthetic limbs. The aim is to provide a foundation by which one can design effective and appropriate prosthetic devices. A metric is also developed by which those developing world considerations can be managed, weighed and incorporated into the design. In this case, experience and observations from the author's work on prosthetics in India are used to assess the contexts and contributions of various developing world factors to the successful incorporation of a prosthetic knee design into that environment. The document uses India as a case study; however, the thesis should serve as a generalized manual for developing world prosthetic knee design. This document begins with a presentation of human gait characteristics presented in a variety of contexts that can be useful to the designer of a prosthetic knee for the developing world. Then, basic mechanical components that are often used in prosthetic knee design are described, using examples. Finally, a thorough description of the many developing world factors that must be understood to design a sustainable prosthetic knee are discussed, and a table is presented by which those factors can be simply reviewed.by Karina N. Pikhart.S.B

General guidelines for designing bilingual low cost digital library services suitable for special library users in developing countries and the Arabic speaking world

The World is witnessing a considerable transformation from print based-formats to elec-tronic-based formats thanks to advanced computing technology, which has a profound impact on the dissemination of nearly all previous formats of publications into digital formats on computer networks. Text, still and moving images, sound tracks, music, and almost all known formats can be stored and retrieved on computer magnetic disk. Over the last two decades, a number of special libraries and information centres in the Arab world have introduced electronic resources into their library services. Very few have implemented automated and integrated systems. Despite the im-portance of designing digital libraries not merely for accessing to or retrieval of information but rather for the provision of electronic services, hardly any special library has started the design of digital library services. Managers of special libraries and information centres in developing countries in general and in the Arab world in particular should start building their local digital libraries, as the benefit of establishing such electronic services is considerably massive and well known for expansion of re-search activities and for delivering services that satisfy the needs of targeted end-users. The aim of this paper is to provide general guideline for design of special low cost digital library providing ser-vices that are most frequently required by various categories of special library users in developing countries. This paper also aims at illustrating strategies and method approaches that can be adopted for building such projects. Seeing the importance of designing an inexpensive digital li-brary as basic principle for the design accordingly, the utilisation of today's ICTs and freely avail-able open sources software is the right path for accomplishing such goal. The paper intends to de-scribe the phases and stages required for building such projects from scratch. It also aims at high-lighting the barriers and obstacles facing Arabic content and how could such problems overcome

Bicycle-powered attachments : designing for developing countries

Thesis (S.B.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Mechanical Engineering, 2009.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (p. 35).There are 550 million smallholder farmers around the world who earn less than $1/day who could benefit from pedal-powered attachments. This project discusses factors to consider in designing for developing countries and highlights experimental methods that help to optimize the power transmission of bicycle attachments. In comparing power transmission through three main modes off of bicycles, via chain drive and friction drive, this thesis proposes recommendations for design in developing countries, including the advantages of chain-driven attachments and considerations necessary for successful implementation.by Jodie Wu.S.B

Beyond Summarization: Designing AI Support for Real-World Expository Writing Tasks

Large language models have introduced exciting new opportunities and challenges in designing and developing new AI-assisted writing support tools. Recent work has shown that leveraging this new technology can transform writing in many scenarios such as ideation during creative writing, editing support, and summarization. However, AI-supported expository writing--including real-world tasks like scholars writing literature reviews or doctors writing progress notes--is relatively understudied. In this position paper, we argue that developing AI supports for expository writing has unique and exciting research challenges and can lead to high real-world impacts. We characterize expository writing as evidence-based and knowledge-generating: it contains summaries of external documents as well as new information or knowledge. It can be seen as the product of authors' sensemaking process over a set of source documents, and the interplay between reading, reflection, and writing opens up new opportunities for designing AI support. We sketch three components for AI support design and discuss considerations for future research.Comment: 3 pages, 1 figure, accepted by The Second Workshop on Intelligent and Interactive Writing Assistant

Science and poverty

"Agricultural research has greatly increased the yields of important staple food crops, and for many people this has meant more food availability and trade opportunities. Yet many people in rural areas in developing countries still live in abject poverty. Therefore, policymakers, donors, and researchers are refocusing their priorities away from simply producing more food to making sure that agricultural research benefits the poor in particular. How can we ensure that new agricultural technologies are appropriate for the different groups of people who most need assistance? Furthermore, how can we assess whether these new technologies actually reduce poverty? This report provides valuable answers by synthesizing lessons learned from seven case studies from around the developing world. The studies show that measures of the direct impacts of new technologies on incomes and yields do not tell the whole story. Both economic and noneconomic factors (such as sources of vulnerability, gender roles, and the source of the disseminated technology) play an extremely important role in determining whether the poor adopt or benefit from a technology.... In addition, social, cultural, and economic factors all influence whether the poor receive direct and indirect benefits from new technologies. Therefore, it is crucial that impact assessments include a mix of disciplines and methods, and that researchers do not only focus on poverty-reducing impacts that are easy to measure. For the future, scientists and other decision makers designing new research programs need to understand all the social factors that will affect the uptake and impacts of technologies. They also need to understand poor people's strategies for managing risk and the importance and role of agriculture in their livelihood strategies." Authors' PrefaceSouthern Africa ,South Asia ,North America ,South Asia and Central Asia ,Europe and North America ,africa south of sahara ,Poverty alleviation Developing countries ,Agricultural research ,Agricultural technology ,Impact assessment ,Gender issues ,

Web Development Using Angular: A Case Study

Web development is same as building a house. Just like we require a plan, a building permit and license from city, web development also requires documentation, appropriate server, designing and a programming language. Since the standards of web de- signing are always increasing and so does the complexity of the technology required, frameworks have now become a crucial part of developing websites or web applications. It is absolutely unreasonable to reinvent the wheel, thus for designing rich and attractive websites, it is very much sensible to use frameworks endorsed by developers all over the world. Django, Angular, Spring, React, Vue, Express are some of the well-known web development frameworks. In my project I have used Angular

Learning to work together: designing a multi-user virtual reality game for social collaboration and perspective-taking for children with autism

Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) find it difficult to engage in reciprocal, shared behaviours and technology could be particularly helpful in supporting children’s motivations and skills in this area. Designing educational technologies for children with ASD requires the integration of a complex range of factors including pedagogical and cognitive theories; the affordances of the technology; and the real-world contexts of use. This paper illustrates how these factors informed the design of a novel collaborative virtual reality environment (CVE) for supporting communicative perspective-taking skills for high-functioning children with ASD. Findings from a small-scale study involving eight typically developing (TD) children (aged 8 years) and six children with ASD (verbal mental age 9 years) are also reported. Children with ASD were supported to be reciprocal and collaborative in their responses, suggesting that this CVE could form the basis for a useful technology-based educational intervention

Domain-specific functional software testing: A progress report

Software Engineering is a knowledge intensive activity that involves defining, designing, developing, and maintaining software systems. In order to build effective systems to support Software Engineering activities, Artificial Intelligence techniques are needed. The application of Artificial Intelligence technology to Software Engineering is called Knowledge-based Software Engineering (KBSE). The goal of KBSE is to change the software life cycle such that software maintenance and evolution occur by modifying the specifications and then rederiving the implementation rather than by directly modifying the implementation. The use of domain knowledge in developing KBSE systems is crucial. Our work is mainly related to one area of KBSE that is called automatic specification acquisition. One example is the WATSON prototype on which our current work is based. WATSON is an automatic programming system for formalizing specifications for telephone switching software mainly restricted to POTS, i.e., plain old telephone service. Our current approach differentiates itself from other approaches in two antagonistic ways. On the one hand, we address a large and complex real-world problem instead of a 'toy domain' as in many research prototypes. On the other hand, to allow such scaling, we had to relax the ambitious goal of complete automatic programming, to the easier task of automatic testing

INFORMATION SYSTEM STRATEGIC PLANNING BASED ON TOGAF ADM FRAMEWORK IN BUDGET, TREASURY, AND ACCOUNTING FUNCTION OF REVENUE AND FINANCIAL MANAGEMENT DEPARTMENT BANDUNG REGENCY

Revenue and Financial Management Department (DPPK) is public oriented enterprise that engaged in the world of financial. To carry out its business activities in achieving the goal of the company, DPPK needs information system strategic planning that is supported by enterprise architecture concept. Moreover, with the government policy became one of the challenges in the financial world to align business and information technology strategy in accordance with the needs of DPPK. Enterprise architecture is one of methods that can be used to align business and information technology strategy that is designed to suit the business needs. TOGAF ADM can be one of the framework that can be used as a guidelines in designing of enterprise architecture. Usage of TOGAF ADM in this study due to the iterative, detail, and sustainable nature in developing of enterprise architecture level. TOGAF ADM is composed of 9 phases from preliminary phase to change management architecture phase, but in this research only focus on 6 phase from preliminary phase until opportunitites and solution phase. This research results in business, information system, and technology architecture blueprint used as a reference for designing information system strategic planning of DPPK. With these result, DPPK has ability to optimize all IT resource to support all business activity. So in the future can evolve to be better in achieving the goal. Keywords: information systrem strategic planning, enterprise architecture, TOGAF AD