This Sunday April 14, I will be talking about our journey into inventing construction sets for health and recent field insights from our partners around the world. If you are in New Haven this weekend and want to play with Legos, stop by our presentation:

63 High Street
Linsly Chittenden Hall (LC)
Yale University
New Haven, CT
10:45am-12:15pm

The conference is a huge gathering of global health practitioners from all over the world. It’s an amazing logistical feat every year! I’m already looking forward to talking with medical doctors who are out in the field where the action is, a group of Swiss inventors who’ve come up with a low cost X-Ray system, and students from the area and across the country who are eager to make a difference.

Summer Translational Research Fellowship Announcement Application Due 4/1/13.

Center for Future Technologies in Cancer Care (CFTCC) at Boston University (www.bu.edu/ftcc): Member of the NIH POCTRN Network

We are requesting applications for a Summer Translational Research Fellowship. One fellowship will be awarded this year. The period of the fellowship is negotiable, but should be completed between May and September 2013.

The Center: Technologies to enable cancer treatments in local clinics or as home care could significantly lower healthcare costs. Examples include but are not limited to targeted ultrasound and light-based treatments, tools for monitoring chemotherapy patients at home between treatments, novel drug delivery methods, diagnostics and mobile health strategies.

Purpose of the Fellowship: The fellowship is meant to support the development of a new technology in the area of point-of-care technologies for the treatment, screening, diagnosis or monitoring of cancer.  The fellowship will allow the Fellow to spend protected time on activities that are aimed at technology development and directed professional development (training) that will support applications for follow on funding.  Fellows are encouraged to propose multidisciplinary work during in the fellowship period.  Strong proposals will integrate clinical needs assessment with technological and engineering aspects, and will specifically focus on the challenges of devices meant for use at the point-of-care.   Fellows will be encouraged to apply for follow on funding through the CFTCC and other agencies and foundations or, if appropriate, to seek private funding.

Elligibility: Applicants must hold an M.D. or a Ph.D. in a relevant field. Post doctoral researchers are eligible only if their current funding mechanism allows them to accept additional funding.

Amount and Use of Funds: Funds up to $25,000 are available.  Funds can be used for salary support, prototype development, proof of concept experiments and/or field testing.  Fellows may use some of the funds to travel to Boston for meetings and work at the Center.  The CFTCC will offer assistance to the Fellow in the form of prototyping and early clinical assessment of the new technology, including advice regarding intellectual property and regulatory issues.

Timeline for this RFA:

Application Due Date: 1 April 2013

Notification: 1 May 2013

Fellowship Period (flexible): 15 May 2013- 15 August 2013.

Application Instructions:

Please use Arial 11 font, and 0.5 inch margins on all sides.  Preliminary data is allowed and encouraged. The application package should be no more than nine (9) pages total. Applications that do not meet the formatting instructions will not be read.

1. Cover Sheet The cover page with the requested signatures must be included (1 page).

2. Curriculum Vitae: The application should include a current NIH Biosketch (page limit 4 pages).

3. Description of the Technology: The applicant should describe the technology in no more than two (2) pages, including figures and references. A description of the proposed activity during the fellowship should be included. Metrics for success should be listed and discussed.  These may be listed in terms of milestones. Plans for follow on funding beyond the fellowship period should be addressed.

4. Description of CFTCC Involvement: The applicant should describe in no more than one (1) page how the proposed technology matches the mission of the Center and how the Center resources will contribute to the eventual translation of the technology.

5. Budget: A one (1) page budget describing how the fellowship money will be spent should be included. List all salaries, supplies, travel, etc.

Please submit the completed application as ONE PDF to hfawcett@bu.edu by 5 pm EDT 4/1/13.

This information is also listed at www.bu.edu/ftcc/funding-opportunities

Source: Lin et al, J. Appl. Phys. 105, 093111 (2009)

For those of you interested. MAPLE DW – Matrix Assisted Pulsed Laser Evaporation Direct Write is a way of using laser beam to “fleck” off the underside coating of a transparent sheet onto a bottom sheet. It’s like using carbon copy paper but instead of a pen, you use a laser beam, and instead of carbon you can use fancy materials like gold, cells, or biologicals. Then you write with those substances at a microscopic level. So far, I’m trying to see if we can pull this off with the laser cutter. We’re not sure if we can pull this off with the laser cutter.

The goal of the book was not to a assemble a catalog of solutions, but an anthology of how the solutions came to be and the lessons learned for others who want to jump into the space.

Want to learn more about how to implement bluetooth glucometers in the Caribbean  Or implement a smoke cessation strategy in the UK? Or how our Nicaraguan counterparts came up with cell phone minutes in exchange for medication adherence? Read on here.

The Klapperich Lab at Boston University is hosting the Second Annual Microfluidics 2.0 Conference. It’s going to be a great event and the Little Devices Lab is looking forward to seeing you there! We’ll be talking about Design for Hack for Paper Diagnostics and adherence technologies such as Adhere.IO

Professor Catherine Klapperich at Boston University will keep things moving with a combination of fresh technologies and hands-on workshops.

When: Friday 11/30/12 and Saturday morning 12/1/2012, at Boston University

Title: Reshaping Global Health: Translating Scientific Advances into Global Action

Date: Tuesday, October 2, 2012

Time: 2:00 p.m. to 3:00 p.m

I am really excited to be giving the keynote presentation at the 3M Carlton Society in a couple of weeks. The Carlton Society is award given to 3M employees for technical excellence within that corporation. We use 3M products all the time, not just the Post-It notes so it will be a real treat to tour their facilities in St. Paul.

What I’m going to discuss is the the Construction Set and how we try to use it and reinvent it at Little Devices. An abstract:

More at Make

Travelling to Texas and other states in the South? Pack some neglected disease diagnostics along with that sunscreen. The New York Times reports of outbreaks in a series of neglected diseases such as dengue, cysticercosis, murine typhus and others. Neglected diseases are global diseases, and the Texas example shows how much remains to be done. Check out more at

A new generation of robots is shifting the nature of work. And they’re getting more and more accessible. More at NYTimes

Our team travelled to Nicaragua over the last 10 days and Annie Labine’s blog covered the Aspiramolde project. More pictures on Flickr

The Institute of Medicine invited us to participate in the IOM Workshop on Developing and Strengthening the Global Supply Chain for Second-Line Drugs for Multidrug-Resistant See the full program

The science fiction author William Gibson said “The future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed.”

Well, this is our attempt at evening things out. (Under construction!)

Inside the PULSE station, visitors find an array of biosensors related to everyday health in urban environments. We’ve had 25 cents public scales for a long time, followed up by sit down blood pressure stations at pharmacy chains. In many cases, these are the only times people will have their blood pressure taken except for that rare doctor visit or in the case of certain healthcare systems, a more frequent visit to the emergency room. So we’ve decided to the take the idea a step further and allow users to interact with a biosensor arcade inside our PULSE stations.

We’ve included:

• Blood Pressure
• Pulse Oximetry + Heart Rate
• Temperature
• Weight/Hydration/Body Fat
• Digital Spirometers
• Breathalyzer
• Respiration Rate
• Stress (using heart rate variability)
• EEG scanners

Have we missed anything? Let us know.

Our goal is have an array of networked stations that can report aggregate and personalized information so that can understand the everyday health of citizens and let them benefit from available and up and coming technologies for monitoring health.

In the next few days, we’ll be reporting on the performance of our roll out. If you want a station in your city, let us know so we can brainstorm on how to make that happen!

Behind the Scenes
The people making this actually happen are a wonderful collection of bright students from MIT, Dartmouth and architectural professionals in Boston.

Cristina Borda, Stephanie Cooke and Stephanie Crocker

An early mockup