Learning by Doing: Transitioning Healthcare Technology Innovations from MIT Labs to Resource-Scarce Communities

Abstract

The affordability and accessibility of healthcare innovations is critical for the well-being of resourcescarce communities around the world. Yet little research centers on precisely how and when financial, material, and logistical resource constraints enter the design cycle producing such innovations. MIT labs across engineering and science departments, where novel research on healthcare technologies is strong, offer an ideal environment from which to explore how technological innovations from an academic lab translate into the real world and whether the resource constraints of low-income communities are used as a design input. This study is especially pertinent to my own work in healthcare technology innovation: I am designing and building a low-cost sickle cell disease diagnostic to be used in sub-Saharan Africa where sickle cell disease prevalence is high but there is a lack of diagnoses due in part to the cost of testing. As a student currently designing a product for explicit use in resource-scarce areas, I aimed to learn how MIT faculty, research scientists, and students have designed and implemented their products to be valuable to communities in need. My diagnostic project thus acts as the client project for this thesis. By interviewing women across Africa and Asia about women’s and children’s health in slums, settings of deep and growing income and resource scarcity and inequality, I gained an understanding of the need for accessible and affordable healthcare in areas where my diagnostic would be implemented. Through qualitative interviews with MIT scholars, the thesis explores how and when scarcity on the ground influences work, but also highlights the importance of incorporating the ability to manufacture and distribute new technologies, to consider systemic constraints, and to understand the needs of potential partners and stakeholders in the design of an innovation. Informed by participatory principles and a prioritization of situated knowledge in urban planning, this thesis shows how research and practice can be combined reflexively in the fields of global health and engineering to create a practical and implementable product in an academic lab with impact for some of the most marginalized communities in need of healthcare improvements.