At AKU’s first-ever Hackathon, a group of 8 faculty and students, Team Breath Hacks, developed a low cost prototype for a challenge that hits every emergency room: the high demand for life-saving ventilators. The alternative to a ventilator is an inflatable ambubag with medical staff and even relatives having to manually pump air to help a patient breathe - often for hours on end.
Not only is the ambubag an inefficient device but its use can also be distressing for those involved. During the three-day Hackathon in 2016, Team Breath Hacks developed a low-cost mechanical pump that automated the previously manual process.
The device is one of many ideas currently being developed at the University by faculty who provide mentorship and introductions to possible development partners.
In a lecture at the University on how to support innovation on campus, Dr Asad Mian, chair of the department of emergency medicine at AKU, described the progress being made by Breath Hacks and also shared an update on a mobile phone application being developed by Dr Faysal Subhani, an MBBS graduate from the class of 2015.
Dr Subhani’s application aims to help doctors gauge the severity of respiratory distress in children presenting to the emergency department. The application, which is based on treatment protocols by the World Health Organization, is being developed in partnership with the e-health resource centre at the Aga Khan Development Network.
During the lecture, Dr Asad Mian described the potential of such low cost innovations to tackle the problem of resource limitations in busy healthcare settings. He stressed that the typical solutions of replicating high-tech processes or importing expensive technology rarely represented viable solutions for developing countries.
“Resource limitations can be frustrating but they also present an opportunity that forces us to be innovative. If the right culture is present in an organisation, then low cost innovation has the potential to transform the economic and social potential of healthcare in the developing world,” he added.
Speaking about the elements needed to foster such innovation, Dr Asad spoke about how an open-minded, non-hierarchical environment was an important driver for change. He added that teamwork between people with different areas of expertise was another factor that enabled people to efficiently ‘hack’ problems.
In his speech, he also highlighted how staff and faculty at the University are working to develop the concept of a biomedical incubator, and later an accelerator, on campus to facilitate conversion of problem-solving ideas into promising inventions.
A proposal to set up a resource known as the Innovation and Incubation Space at AKU’s Centre of Innovation in Medical Education has been prepared by Dr Walid Farooqi, an MBBS graduate from the Class of 2016.
Once finalised, it will help connect mentors and experts from different professions such as IT, business and engineering with potential innovators at AKU. Over time, a formal incubator with multiple stakeholders will be put in place to develop cross-disciplinary collaborations to help design prototypes that can be trialed in real-world settings, Dr Asad stated.
“Such a facility is the need of the hour. The ever-increasing demand for high quality healthcare for low and middle income countries continues to put the healthcare system’s resources to the test. We need to find new ways to boost the quality and quantity of healthcare and that can only begin when we realise the need for new approaches to our problems,” he concluded.
Dr Asad Mian, Dr Walid Farooqui and Dr Faysal Subhani are part of the Critical Creative Innovative Thinking (CCIT) Forum which is an educational, training and research programme seeking to foster creativity and innovation in biomedicine and healthcare.