[Mitai-announce] IEEE-EMBS March 18 seminar on global health technology development

[Wasim Q. Malik]

7:00 PM, Wednesday, 18 March 
  

"Global Health Technology Development: Getting it Right"



Kristian Olson, MD, MPH, Massachusetts General Hospital and CIMIT 



A transition of technological design for Global Health is underway. The developing world has graveyards of medical devices that were not designed for the settings where they are found. Delivery systems are not functioning and beleaguered health care providers cannot keep up. An intersection of disciplines ranging from clinical, public health, anthropology, design, engineering, and business is needed. Insights of would-be users of equipment and those that stand to maintain them are essential components to develop life-saving technologies for areas where necessity should be the mother of innovation.



Dr. Kristian Olson is an internist/pediatrician on staff at the Massachusetts General Hospital. Dr. Olson was a Fulbright Scholar to Australia where he earned a Master's of Public Health degree in Epidemiology and International Health. Dr. Olson was also the first MGH Thomas S. Durant Fellow in Refugee Medicine and obtained a diploma in Tropical Medicine & Hygiene in London. Dr. Olson has served in some of the most resource-poor settings in the world including refugee camps along the Thai-Burmese border, in tsunami-affected regions of Sumatra, on health projects in Cambodia and Kenya, and with the American Refugee Committee in Darfur. He currently serves as a board member of the Cambodian Health Committee. He was recently described by the Boston Globe as being "the Man" for life-saving devices, and his work on creating incubators out of auto parts has been featured in the New York Times. 



This meeting is free and open to the public.  The chapter meeting is scheduled for 7:00 PM, March 18, at MIT Building 66, Room 66-110, Cambridge, MA.  The meeting is co-sponsored by the Student Chapter of the MIT Biomedical Engineering Society (BMES) and the Boston chapter of the IEEE Society for Social Implications of Technology. Dinner will be served prior to the event at 6:30 PM, with the lecture starting at 7:00 PM.  



For more information contact Brian Tracey at btracey at neurometrix.com . If you'd like to join our EMBS Facebook group, please click on http://www.facebook.com/home.php#/group.php?gid=38926347595 .  We use the group to advertise seminars and other events of interest to EMBS members.