Projects

To help students successfully develop their project proposals, examples from award-winning projects were distributed. Each proposal is presented courtesy of the team members listed, and used with their permission.

TEAMs	PROPOSALs	COMPETITION
Tommy Ngai, Debu Sen, Heather Lukacs	Innovative Drinking Water Treatment Technology for Bangladesh, West Bengal, and Nepal (PDF)	IDEAS 2002
Juhi Chandalia, Brittany Coulbert, Philip Hou, Jin Kim	TestWaterCheap (PDF)	IDEAS 2004
Teresa Baker, Stephanie Dalquist, Kimberly Harrison, Radu Raduta, Jessica Vechakul, Alexander Yip	Bicilavadora: the Pedal-Powered Washing Machine (PDF)	IDEAS 2005
Susan Murcott, Tommy Ngai	Arsenic Biosand Filter: Sustainable Implementation of an Appropriate Household Drinking Water Filter for Rural Nepal (PDF)	World Bank Development Marketplace 2003
Amy Mueller, Matthew Orosz, Sorin Grama, Ignacio Aquirre, Perry Hung, Elizabeth Wayman, Mark Wolf	Synergetic Power Systems (PDF)	Ignite Clean Energy 2006

D-Lab III students form teams at the outset of the spring term as a means to further develop their innovation and move it forward. Students also build relationships with community partners in the process of collaboratively designing, evaluating and testing their innovation. The following pages contain a brief description of each Spring 2007 project, their proposals, and their final presentations. All material is presented courtesy of the students named on each page and used with their permission.

New DOTS - Jeff Blander, Elizabeth Gillenwater, Jose Gomez-Marquez, Minyoun Jang, Angela Kilby, Aron Walker

Vac-Cast - Tess Veuthey, Aron Zingman, Maria Luckyanova, Goutam Reddy, Irina Azu, Stephen Samouhos

Biogas Nicaragua - Chris Tostado, Xavier Gonzalez, Julian Villarreal, Russell Rodewald

LearnTB - Nupur Garg, Malancha Gupta, Jessica Lee, Daniel Mokrauer-Madden, Aparna Ramanathan

DataHealth Pakistan - Ebad Ahmed, Ali Alhassani, Elena Glassman, Jehanzeb Noor, Eugene Shih, Zeeshan Syed, Rehan Tahir

EVCO - Sarah Edinger, Katherine Wong, Stephen Samouhos, Jessica Lee, Joshua Jiricek, Tamira Gunzburg

Sustainable Shelters - Zehra Ali, Harmeet Gill, Jean Li

Diagram of a novel biogas digester system prototype.

Biogas Nicaragua.

Biogas Nicaragua has optimized the design and process of methane production from biogas digesters to address the issue of the growing energy need in the area surrounding the town of Diriamba, Carazo, Nicaragua. Biogas Nicaragua has developed a three-tiered scaffold to incorporate three interdependent reactors that are part of a multi-phase continuous biogas digestor. The innovations of this project are:

Having a three-stage process allows for separation of the phases of methane production which enables more regulation of the pH in the various production stages, resulting in an optimized environment for methanogens and other bacteria to convert biomass into biogas. This will yield more methane per same amount of manure than a single-phase generator.
Incorporating more process engineering principles into the design of biogas digestors in terms of component sizing, support structure, and use of gravity to facilitate autonomous process dynamics and achieve a continuous production of biogas at steady state.
Integrating rural house planning with energy structures that involve biogas technology.

Biogas Nicaragua will work on the land of an ecological reserve/farm called Rancho Guadalupe to build a full-scale prototype, a small-scale version of which has already been designed and built at MIT, that reduces retention and start-up times and improves the energy production of existing biogas technologies currently implemented in Central America.

Final Proposal (PDF)

Final Presentation (PDF)

Continuous Tracking and Analysis of Disease Outbreaks in Rural Areas of Lahore, Pakistan: Identifying Underserved Villages at High Risk for Outbreaks and Discovering Patterns Associated with Disease Incidence

Illustration of how rural communities with similar socioeconomic characteristics that might be at increased risk for outbreaks and should be preemptively targeted through community efforts.

DataHealth Pakistan.

The focus of this innovation is to explore the use of sophisticated analytical techniques and geographic information systems, coupled with the distribution of new cases recorded at healthcare facilities, to identify sub-communities in rural areas of Lahore that are at high risk for outbreaks. The Ministry of Health in Pakistan, as part of a project in association with USAID, UNICEF, WHO and World Bank, already maintains a national health information database with information from primary healthcare centres. We propose to extend this work through the following innovations:

Use data from public hospitals to discover “hidden islands,” i.e., identify underserved regions affected by disease where primary healthcare centres do not exist and patients had to visit the nearest city to seek treatment. These cases would not appear in the national health information database, which collects data from primary healthcare facilities. No such facilities exist in underserved regions, and disease outbreaks would therefore not be recorded for these areas. Instead, the disease numbers for such regions must be backwards-reconstructed by pooling hospitals records together.
Supplement information about disease incidence in each region with detailed demographic and socioeconomic data collected by other government agencies and with data in geographic information systems (GIS) such as the ones that exist at MIT. This information allows for a means to relate communities and discover similarities that may be useful in pre-empting disease outbreaks and also for understanding factors that play a key role in the occurrence of a disease.
Promote projects in high-risk sub-communities that might be able to spread awareness of protective mechanisms and simple therapies.

Final Proposal (PDF)

Final Presentation (PDF)

Image of a prototype device that utilized the waste heat from the exhaust of a civilian pick up truck in order to distill and purify water while the vehicle was idling or in use.

EVCO-Heating Schools in Lesotho

While the federal government of Lesotho is making a significant effort to improve the quality of education, the quality of the rural school environment leaves a lot to be desired because there is no grid electricity or running water far from the capital. Therefore, the rural schools lack some of the most basic facilities, especially in the highlands where about 37% of Lesotho’s populations live. To make matters worse, the winters are harshest in the mountains, so children spend their school days huddled in blankets at average temperatures around -5°C. Over the last few years, winters have begun as early as April and ended as late as October.

The EVCO heating unit will provide enough heat to make the school environment one where children can focus on their learning and not on their physical discomfort from cold temperatures. EVCO’s heating innovation is a technology that will capture otherwise wasted heat from generators and use it to provide classrooms with hot water for space heating, cooking, or cleaning. This service is provided at a fractional sacrifice of electricity output from the generator, and at no additional running cost. The innovation was designed by team member, Stephen Samouhos, and is currently under a provisional patent (patent # 60,777,454; Waste Heat Powered Potable Water Distiller). One of EVCO’s community partners with whom the team has joined forces is currently engaged in deploying solar-derived electric power equipment in the area. EVCO’s technology will be seamlessly integrated with their existing package in order to co-generate electricity and hot water from sunlight. Two members of the EVCO team will travel to Lesotho and install a simple, low cost retro-fit heat exchanger device to existing school diesel generators and solar thermal power devices. Through this pilot stage effort, EVCO will take the first step toward the provision of heat needed by a school in Lesotho during the bitter cold season.

Final Proposal (PDF)

Final Presentation (PDF)

Example of child-targeted educational materials to raise awareness of tuberculosis.

LearnTB: Disseminating Appropriate TB Education in India

Over five million people suffer from tuberculosis (TB) in India and one thousand people die each day. TB medication is available to help save these people, but delivering the medication and monitoring a patient’s compliance to the drugs still remains a huge challenge. Moreover, TB eradication involves more than treating those known to be affected. To prevent the transmission of TB, we need to raise awareness of the disease and how it can be contracted and cured. LearnTB addresses these specific challenges in a sustainable and effective manner.

Specifically, we focus on public health education by targeting the primary school-aged community. These are members of society who are most likely to benefit from this knowledge and have access to an educational setting. We have developed an understandable, fun, and activity based 3-week curriculum to educate the school-going population of underserved communities about the TB disease, contraction, prevention, and treatment. Currently, our team has outstanding teaching experience and is capable of teaching in three languages: English, Hindi, and Bengali. LearnTB’s partner organization in our TB education campaign is ASHA for Education, a group that sets up schools and additional informal learning centers in underserved communities in India. Currently, ASHA has over 700 educational projects which reach out to thousands of people and have widespread impact. We are working directly with the ASHA branch in the town of Natpurwa as well as the ASHA chapter in Boston to tailor our curriculum to the background and needs of the community with whom we intend to work and disseminate our curriculum to our target demographic.

Final Proposal (PDF)

Final Presentation (PDF)

New DOTS (IDEAS Competition Prize-winner $5,000)

The TB Problem

One-third of the world carries tuberculosis (TB) and within that group, 14.6 million people have an active case. These numbers are both shocking and tragic because there is an effective treatment for the disease. However, unmonitored patients often forget or avoid taking their drugs because the treatment is long (six months), complicated (consisting of a multiple drug regimen), and can cause uncomfortable side effects and alleviation of symptoms (but not the actual infection) before the treatment period is over. The result is that in most developing settings only 15% percent of patients who begin treatment will finish it unless they are closely monitored. Thus the global TB problem is spiraling out of control and drug-resistant TB is becoming more prevalent, leading to fears of widespread outbreaks of TB super-strains.

Existing Solutions

The best solution to have yet been found for this problem is the Directly Observed Therapy, Short-course (DOTS) system, which is the primary plank in the World Health Organization’s tuberculosis eradication program. This system achieves high rates of treatment adherence (around 85%) because healthcare workers observe patients take their drugs every day. However, DOTS is extremely expensive - between $70 and $150 per patient - and human resource intensive. The high costs and deficit of trained health workers mean that the most rural and poor areas have low rates of DOTS penetration, with little hope that DOTS can feasibly be extended to those areas . Thus, DOTS coverage varies significantly by country and, in 2002, was available only to approximately 37% of people with TB. Within countries there are also huge regional variations. For example, coverage in India is relatively extensive, with optimistic measures estimating 84% percent of the population is covered by DOTS, but those remaining 16% percent are in extremely rural and poor areas where there is neither money nor human resources for DOTS.

Summary

Our system is a combination of a novel remote monitoring device and microfinance-based incentives:

Novel urinalysis test strips check daily that patients have taken their drugs (reducing forgetfulness and procrastination);
Reporting using widespread cell phone technology reduces the need for human resources (eliminating the issue of health worker absenteeism and lowering the cost to half that of DOTS); and
Customized microfinance incentives reward compliant patients with progressively increasing benefits (encouraging them to continue treatment even when side effects cause discomfort or symptoms are alleviated but infection persists).

The New Dots system allows penetration of tuberculosis monitoring into disadvantaged areas where lack of infrastructure makes DOTS extremely difficult, if not impossible, to implement. Furthermore, we expect that our system will be so much more inexpensive and effective that it will be an attractive alternative for almost every organization that uses DOTS.

New DOTS (PDF)

Sustainable shelters.

Sustainable Shelters goal is to educate and empower people, affected by the October 2005 earthquake in Pakistan, to build their own homes and assist in the transition to self-sufficiency in the reconstruction process. This would be achieved through focusing on the dissemination of construction improvements that could make existing traditional housing safer and more sustainable. The construction of a demonstration home, provision of training sessions, and distribution of literature are the key components for educating the population about improvements in construction, which focus on efficiency, resourcefulness, affordability, and adaptability. The suggested improvements illustrate low cost innovations for seismic resistance, thermal efficiency, rain water harvesting, indoor ventilation, and daylighting. These improvements provide the local community with options for upgrading their existing shelters that remain within their financial, social, and environmental constraints. The project is centered around the local needs and priorities of a community in the Rawalkot District of Pakistan, where our community partners are constructing two primary schools and intending to move the post-earthquake reconstruction forward by developing a model village.

Final Proposal (PDF)

Final Presentation (PDF)

Vac-Cast Prosthetics (IDEAS Competition Prize-winner $7,500)

Image of a human-powered evacuation device for vacuum-casting prosthetics.

Vac-Cast prosthetics.

Every year, there are over 25,000 new amputees in India as a result of disease, and agricultural, industrial and road accidents. Roughly half of these victims receive a prosthetic device that is specifically tailored to their residual limb. The other half receive no prosthetic, despite the fact that organizations exist to provide this prosthetic fitting and manufacturing service at no cost to the patient. One of the deciding factors for a patient to opt for that service is whether they can devote the two to three days needed to be treated with the prosthetic fitting and fabrication process. Conversely, service organizations are limited in their patient throughput by the finite resources that they can allocate per patient for the lengthy treatment.

Fortunately, there is a novel sand-casting fitting technique that could increase patient throughput by a factor of five. This technique however can not be deployed because its core support equipment, an electric vacuum device, is too costly and electricity intensive for a clinic to bear. To overcome the existing limitations of deploying this sand-casting technique, we have developed a simple alternative to the vacuum machine in current use. Our technology is a unique and easy-to-use human-powered evacuation device that costs under $200, is built from tools commonly found in a mechanic shop, uses no electricity and can be integrated seamlessly with the other sand-casting treatment devices.

Our community partner in this endeavor is Jaipur Foot Organization (JFO), the world leader in the fitting and manufacturing of prosthetic limbs. We have developed this device in collaboration with JFO affiliates in order to guarantee that our technology will meet the same needs currently supported by the electric vacuum machine. We will work with JFO to field test the device in August 2007 in Jaipur, India, with the expectation of continued collaboration to manufacture and distribute our vacuum device to JFO clinics worldwide.

Final Proposal (PDF)

Final Presentation (PDF)

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D-Lab: Disseminating Innovations for the Common Good

Projects

Continuous Tracking and Analysis of Disease Outbreaks in Rural Areas of Lahore, Pakistan: Identifying Underserved Villages at High Risk for Outbreaks and Discovering Patterns Associated with Disease Incidence

EVCO-Heating Schools in Lesotho

New DOTS (IDEAS Competition Prize-winner $5,000)

The TB Problem

Existing Solutions

Summary

Vac-Cast Prosthetics (IDEAS Competition Prize-winner $7,500)

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