Great Idea: Wii Remote Applications

http://tinyurl.com/6shbwwk 

           I am fortunate enough to go to a pretty well-off high school, where my teachers and I have access to state-of-the-art technology and equipment that aids my learning. However, there are many other people and school around the world that do not have nearly as much funding or access to technology as students of my high school do.  This begs the question: is advancing technology really at its full potential if it only benefits a select few? This is exactly the phenomenon that Johnny Lee observed about technology, and he found a way to help solve the problem.

       

              Lee discovered a very unusual and brilliant way to utilize the technology inside of a typical Wii remote controller. Located inside this relatively inexpensive and accessible piece of technology is a high quality infrared camera that has a plethora of possible applications. Utilizing this $40 remote control, Lee created software that can be used to create interactive whiteboard with multi-touch capability (something that I’m not even sure the Smartboards at my high school do). Just attaching the control to a projector creates a device that usually sells for hundreds of dollars; it’s truly amazing. As if that weren’t enough, he used the control to create a cheap way to view images in 3-D, which could revolutionize the video game industry.

          

              Finding a way to take the best that advanced technology has to offer, and make it accessible to as many people as possible is going to be a mindset that takes all of humankind of high levels. It’s important to remember that better technology has to be available to as many people as possible in order for it to truly benefit the human race, and by remembering this, Johnny Lee created a great idea.

Great Idea: The Universal Anesthesia Machine

http://tinyurl.com/77wvhwk

            

            This next idea is sort of the cousin of my previous post about the Water Canary. Seeing a problem that affects the poorest and most vulnerable areas in the world, and finding a way to tailor a device to actually excel in such poor conditions is a brilliant accomplishment; and this next group of people took this idea to the next level.

           

            Erica Frenkel studies health systems in the poorest countries around the globe, identifying and working to find solutions to the most prominent and pressing problems found in these systems. One of the most common (and most horrifying) problems she discovered was the lack of access to safe surgical procedures in these areas.

            

            One of the biggest issues behind this problem was the lack of access to safe anesthesia. In these areas, there aren’t trained technicians to operate complicated anesthesia machines, which leads to failures and complications that causes the most horrifying and terrible tragedies imaginable.  Another problem in these areas is the expensive price tag on these anesthesia machines, which leads to difficulties when repairs are needed, as well as the unreliability of a stable power source, which leads to machine failures. These problems all seem like mountains to conquer, but Erica Frenkel’s along with her colleague Dr. Paul Fenton found a solution: the Universal Anesthesia Machine.

            

           Dr. Fenton had been the chief of anesthesiology at a teaching hospital in Malawi, Africa. Atfer suffering through dozens of patient’s deaths and anesthesia machines failures, he decided enough was enough. He found a room full of broken anesthesia machines, and with a little tinkering created the Universal Anesthesia Machine. The current, revised model is a simple device which can deliver anesthesia with the help of an untrained operator, and can continue to function even through a power outage thanks to an onboard power reserve.  This machine is even less expensive than the traditional machines that have shown to be unsafe in the hospitals of the developing world. This machine hasthe potential to save millions of lives and stop the tragedies that occur around the world due to unsafe surgery, and is therefore and incredible idea. 

Great Idea: The Water Canary

http://tinyurl.com/756fs4y

Over the years science has made great advances at predicting the occurrences of hurricanes and tsunamis, which has saved thousands of lives around the world. However, one type of disaster that science has failed to accurately predict and control is disasters related to water supply.  Diseases like cholera and dysentery can devastate populations of people worldwide simply by spreading through the local water supply, and once the disease has begun to spread in this way it is very difficult, time consuming, and inefficient to control the outbreak.

Currently, the only method of testing water for safety and freedom of disease is a very time consuming process that involves the use of expensive equipment as well as trained technicians; both of which are in short supply in the poverty stricken lands where waterborne illness can be most devastating. Sonaar Luthra saw this problem and was the first to start doing something about it.

Working with fellow engineers and UNICEF, Sonaar Luthra is developing a cheap, simplified, rapid response water testing device which he calls the Water Canary (based off the mining canaries that warned miners of dangerous gasses in the mines). This device wouldn’t run on the typical chemical reactions that most water testing processes utilize; instead it would be solar powered. This energy source allows it to be much quicker at determining water safety, and the overall operating system is extremely simple and requires no special training. These simple, efficient devices could potentially be linked through a network which would serve as a first alert warning system that could track the movement and patterns of contaminated water supplies before they got out of control. This device is specifically tailored to be most effective at solving a problem in the areas that previously would be the most vulnerable to it, which makes it a great idea. 

Great Idea: Squishy Circuit

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-z1U0nrrTsyI/Tu5HsrNrKoI/AAAAAAAAAZc/5ODYM-Krwa0/s400/squishy-circuit-first-test.jpg

              One of the fondest memories of my childhood was playing around with that squishy, brightly-colored clay that most people know of as Playdough; however, I was missing out, because I was using the store bought kind.  It wasn’t until a few years ago that I discovered that you can actually make play dough at home with common household ingredients like flour and salt; you can even color them with food coloring. Needless to say I was disappointed that I hadn’t discovered this sooner. But, what I’ve just discovered is that I’m not the only one who discovered something new about play dough far beyond their childhood years.

            
               AnnMarie Thomas is an engineer, a teacher at the University of St. Thomas, and a huge believer in the value of hands-on learning. One day, she tried to teach her own daughter about circuitry and electricity, and discovered how difficult and frustrating it was for her daughter to maneuver and connect little wires and circuit boards with her tiny hands. Her daughter wasn’t learning anything and if anything it was making her daughter hate learning about electricity.  So AnnMarie and one of her students, Sam, came up with a solution: squishy circuits.

            
              A lot of us probably don’t know this (I know I didn’t), but play dough is actually conductive to electricity! Especially, it turns out, the homemade kind you make with salt and flour from your kitchen. This homemade play dough is even more conductive to electricity than the store bought kind, and can be used to demonstrate all sorts of properties about electricity. In addition, a second recipe of homemade play dough that uses sugar instead of salt, is much less conductive to electricity, and helps make the play dough circuits even more realistic and complex.

            
            Using these two types of homemade play dough, AnnMarie and her daughter lit up lights, powered propellers, and learned a lot about the properties of electricity. AnnMarie even took the idea back to her engineering lab at her university and had her students experiment with it there. This is a cute, simple, fun, and clever idea, and I bet it could help a lot of young kids get excited about science if more kids knew about it.

Great Idea: Skin Cell Gun

http://tinyurl.com/6llxde9

          Between 1 - 2 million Americans seek medical attention for burns each year. Most are mild, and heal all by themselves; but some are horrifyingly severe. Severe burns are one of the most difficult injuries to treat because of the constant pain endured by the patient, as well as the extremely high risk of infection. Even if the pain and risk of infection can be decreased, patients are often left with debilitating scars that they carry for life. That’s why, for burn patients, Jörg C. Gerlach is a medical Superman.

            
           Gerlach, along with his colleges at Stem Cell Systems GmbH in Berlin, believe they are about to revolutionize the treatment of severe burns; and they are going to do it with guns. Not just ordinary guns, however; skin cell guns. This experimental gun utilizes a solution composed of the patients own skin stem cells to evenly coat burn sites with the patient’s own cells which then become skin cells. This is much different from traditional methods where individual sheets of the patient’s skin are grown in laboratories and then applied by surgeons. This process is lengthy and complicated, and the resulting layers of skin are highly fragile. The skin cell gun eliminates both these issues, and has already been experimented with several times and has yielded amazing results: many of the patients had little or no scarring left over from their burns!

            
           This is a truly amazing step forward for the medical community. The amount of good this device has the capacity for is incredible, and I look forward to seeing it develop. One of the best ideas I have seen yet.

For more info: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Y5H9Sasq5U

Great Ideas: Color Coded Surgery

 

    

        If you've taken a biology or an anatomy course, you've probably seen diagrams of the body before in your text books. These diagrams are usually nicely organized and pretty and often color-coded for the convenience of the reader. There is nothing wrong with this; these well-organized diagrams aid readers understanding. However, a real surgeon doesn't see a nice, organized picture like this when he actually performs a surgery.

         The inside of the human body is not exactly pretty; it's dark and confusing and very difficult to work with if you're a surgeon. This problem is part of why disease like cancer that cause tumors can be so difficult to deal with; surgeons have a hard time finding every part of the tumor amongst every other type of tissue inside the body.
         
              As a surgeon, Dr. Quyen Nguyen encounters this problem all too often, and realizes the need for a better way to go about surgery. In this TED talk she discusses Dr. Roger Chen and his team who been developing a kind of molecule marker that could help surgeons by lighting up (literally, with fluorescence) certain tissues (perhaps cancerous tumor tissue) and show them exactly where to cut. This kind of molecule would be a HUGE breakthrough for the medical community, and it's definitely a great idea.