Slashdot Mirror
Students Invent Revolutionary Solar Sterilizer
greenerd writes "Engineering students at Rice University have solved a huge health concern in developing countries by creating a device that uses the sun to sterilize medical instruments. This invention could help prevent the spread of infection and illness in clinics around the world without access to proper sterilization tools."
transparency? since sunshine is the best disinfectant?
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
It's just that the cost of rocket and fuel to transport the instruments to and from the sun is a bit high :)
Great minds think alike; fools seldom differ.
Hold your horses. Is nothing in this invention patented by other parties (or the inventing party for that matter)?
Or just our own?
students... have solved...
No, they haven't. They have made some nice progress, and apparently have small-scale usage in Haiti, but I certainly wouldn't classify the problem as "solved". They still need to get the devices to where they're needed, which means shipping, mass manufacturing, establishing supply lines, and convincing somebody (corporation, government, investor, or otherwise) that this is a worthwhile idea.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
I'll stick to a vasectomy if I have too.
students... have solved...
No, they haven't. They have made some nice progress, and apparently have small-scale usage in Haiti, but I certainly wouldn't classify the problem as "solved". They still need to get the devices to where they're needed, which means shipping, mass manufacturing, establishing supply lines, and convincing somebody (corporation, government, investor, or otherwise) that this is a worthwhile idea.
If it was possible to do all of the above for something non-essential like a laptop computer, I'm pretty sure it can be done with a something that actually saves lives.
The major hurdle has been solved and the tings you mention are just minor details.
MIT was doing this last November.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6SAaHRpbjyg
Doesn't fire sterilize just fine? They have fire.
And, for plastic items, fire can be used to boil water to sterilize those.
You mean there are places in the world that haven't figured out how to boil water?
Yes, the invention that UK and US companies scoffed at, the SA government funded, and has now made the inventor a multi-millionaire.
Why mention that? Because this invention - if it is to succeed - will have to follow a similar path. There's no way on Earth that companies selling highly expensive sterilization systems will want to add a cheap alternative to their sales brochure. And the only way this invention will get refined to the point of being practical and widely distributed is with serious cash - which means a large corporation (see above) or a government providing the seed money.
Having said that, they have to battle inertia. UV lamps can sterilize hospital rooms that have MRSA contamination quickly and easily, but much more expensive and dramatic methods are typically used (largely because they're expensive, dramatic and involve machines that go bing). Inertia is a serious problem in the medical profession. There's good reason for being conservative - you don't want to do more harm than good - but there's plenty of cases where that's merely a pretext for delaying change.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
It's a solar powered hotplate that uses steam. It has a commercial autoclave sitting on the hotplate.
They didn't invent a sterilizer, they invented a way to power existing ones.
You can't take the sky from me...
I didn't know that the sun needed to be sterilized
All the theoretical problems have been worked out, we're sure to all have fusion generators soon. All that's left are the engineering problems. Then the business problems.
Easy, right?
The English word fart is one of the oldest words in the English vocabulary.
I am sorry but I am getting really sick of reading about all these students at prestigious universities who do nothing more than re-purpose existing technology, give it a fancy name, say it will solve some problem for the underdeveloped world, and get international accolades for doing the technological equivalent of buying a paper off the internet and putting their name on it.
Every single piece of this "revolutionary" "invention" can be bought off the shelf and is in current use. The main difference between an autoclave and a standard pressure cooker is that the autoclave is guaranteed to get up to the proper temperature and pressure and then stay there for the specified period of time. Considering that this contraption must be hand adjusted, and it requires at least an hour just to get up to temp, and then it has to stay at that temp for around an hour - being constantly adjusted all the time - there is no guarantee whatsoever that the instruments will actually be sterilized. If the operator gets distracted for a while then all you get is a bunch of hot - but still infectious - instruments.
Sure, if these students built every single piece of their solar steam generator by hand, it would be a good exercise - akin to an art student copying an old master - but that is all. If I was their professor and they tried to pass this off as their own creation I would have failed them and turned them in for plagiarism.
Partners in Health harvests peanuts from a 30-acre farm or buys them from a cooperative of 200 smallholders. It’s planning to build a larger factory, but for now the nuts are taken to the main hospital in Cange, where women sort them in straw baskets, roast them over an outside gas burner, run them through a hand grinder and mix all the ingredients into a paste that is poured into reusable plastic canisters.
PIH has a slideshow of manufacturing Nourimamba on smugmug, here. The Times article does address some of the interesting (and sad) legal wrangling behind a simple peanut mix that has the power to save millions of lives. Also, for an interesting take on how famines can be "manufactured" by unscrupulous governments or warlords seeking to skim or redirect aid, see Linda Polman's work. Here's an excerpt from a Guardian article,
All too frequently, according to Polman, the result is not what it says in the charity brochures. She cites a damning catalogue of examples from Biafra to Darfur, and including the Ethiopian famine, in which humanitarian aid has helped prolong wars, or rewarded the perpetrators of ethnic cleansing and genocide rather than the victims. Perhaps the most striking case in the book deals with the aftermath of the genocide in Rwanda in which the Hutu killers fled en masse across the border to what was then Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo). There, in Goma, huge refugee camps were assembled and served by an enormous array of international agencies, while back in Rwanda, where Tutsi corpses filled rivers and lakes, aid was not so focused. The world was looking for refugees, the symbol of human catastrophe, and the refugees were Hutus. This meant the militias that had committed the atrocities received food, shelter and support, courtesy of international appeals, while their surviving victims were left destitute. Worse still, Polman believes the aid enabled the Hutu extremists to continue their attempt to exterminate the Tutsis from the security of the UNHCR camps in Goma. "Without humanitarian aid," she writes, "the Hutus' war would almost certainly have ground to a halt fairly quickly."
I am Jack's complete lack of surprise.
...sure... and how LONG will they be "developing" for? i.e. how long will it take them to reach European (white) standards? Why can't Africans produce these sorts of things themselves? 'Poverty'. 'Racism'. 'The legacy of slavery'. 'Colonialism'. yadda yadda yadda.
If these things are such no-brainers, then why haven't they been developed previously? The 'obviousness' AFTER THE FACT of these solutions has no bearing on either the creativity, ingenuity, and skill that went into them, nor on their value.
Technology builds upon itself. Most of our technological advancements today come from people who "re-purpose existing technology". I design hardware for a living; I re-purpose existing electronic components in useful, and often novel, ways to create devices that meet a client's needs. A programmer 're-purposes' an existing language, and a set of existing libraries, to create a new and useful application. Mark Shuttleworth takes Linux and Gnome, and re-purposes them to make Ubuntu. (No 'Unity' comments please...). ALL of these, including "these students at prestigious universities who do nothing more than re-purpose existing technology" constitute acts of transformation, not of 'plagiarism'.
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
It's a hack, so it's interesting to someone. It might spark inspiration to rethink both solar conversion and sterilization technology. In larger context, the announcement also raises awareness of the problem of obtaining aseptic conditions in developing countries. Since the hack involves some off-the-shelf stuff, it's easy to start looking at practical applications or to scale-up immediately.
I like thinking like this, and not just from students. I wouldn't have failed them if i was their professor, i would have given kudos for a first try, but see if they could do better.
Every single piece of this "revolutionary" "invention" can be bought off the shelf and is in current use.
Sure, but that's actually one of the few positive aspects to this story. Using generic parts of a kind you can find in the local hardware store is a Good Thing.
I just wish they'd thought about it long enough to realise that in the Caribbean (and the South Pacific, where I live) the most likely disaster scenario is hurricane- or volcano-related. There's not usually a lot of sunlight during such times.
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
If these things are such no-brainers, then why haven't they been developed previously? The 'obviousness' AFTER THE FACT of these solutions has no bearing on either the creativity, ingenuity, and skill that went into them, nor on their value.
Without taking away from your argument - it's perfectly valid - I'd suggest to you that the main reason for lack of development in what's often called Appropriate Technology is that, for the most part, most of the people involved are against new technological approaches, especially those that challenge their own ability to draw a salary.
I've experienced first-hand situations where donors would rather spend a half million dollars on a project that's fraught with predictable, inevitable problems than spend twenty thousand on something new. In every case, it's because there's no Advisor salary attached to the latter. Rhetoric aside, most development agencies have a neo-colonial bias that simply assumes that aid workers are better suited to solving problems than the people who are living them. The real answer is usually somewhere in the middle, but the structures of development aid are such that it's nigh on impossible to actually do good.
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
Yes. Perfection is incredibly easy in some cases. It's not an optical instrument so it's still perfect with fingerprints, specks of dust etc.
There's one guy that made a sun tracking device for his solar reflector using the electronics and motor of a floppy disk drive. A control system for this autoclave probably wouldn't be very difficult and isn't likely to draw much power even if you have a stepping motor moving a small dish. That complicates things but still doesn't move it beyond the realm of student projects.
I bet you that a fresnel lens would work a lot better and is more durable, portable, etc, and probably cheaper
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
That is the Rice media department doing that. I know the kids who made this and they have no misconceptions. It is a mechanical engineering senior design project, and they spent a lot of time designing and machining heat transfer components. It wasn't trivial work and its also not as revolutionary as Rice media makes you think it is (also the guy who invented the Capteur Solei is full of himself).
jenningsthecat,
I'll take your argument one piece at a time:
I did not say "These things" are "no-brainers" - with the implication that a solution to the problem of sterilization was obvious or easy. Naturally, if that were the case then, as you say, there wouldn't be a problem to be solved.
What I said was that the solution being passed off as "revolutionary" is nothing more than plunking an existing piece of equipment down on a source of heat. Exactly what the existing piece of equipment was designed for in the first place. This does not meet the definition of an "invention" by any means. An invention - when made of existing components - must produce a new and unexpected result. Placing an existing device, designed to be heated, down on a hot-plate and having that device get hot, is not a new or unexpected result. Your argument about the obviousness of this "invention" being apparent only "after the fact" is misguided at best. But it is definitely moot.
Next you engage in the "fallacy of equivocation." You use two different definitions for the term "re-purpose." The first definition - the one I used - is to take an existing piece of equipment with an existing function and simply make a claim that it can be used in a different environment - the cause de jour - and stake a claim to a "revolutionary" "invention." Your definition - stretched at best - is the use of existing components to make a new device that does, in fact, produce a new and unexpected result. This definition more correctly fits the term "invention" (as defined by the USPTO) than the term "re-purpose," (as I used it) which patent law specifically says is not an invention.
The fallacy in your equivocation is even more evident in your claim that programmers "re-purpose" computer languages. In fact, programmers use computer languages for exactly what they were designed for: to write programs. The language is a tool not a component. Just because a saw is used to cut a board for a different house does not mean the saw has been "re-purposed." Anyone who claims so is confused at best and disingenuous at worst.
Your claim that Ubuntu is nothing more than slapping Gnome on top of Linux in the same manner that these students just slapped an existing autoclave on top of a different - yet currently existing - source of heat is either an insult to the Ubuntu team or exhibits a complete lack of understanding of what makes a Linux distribution successful. The Ubuntu team put years into writing and re-writing installers along with other custom code and modifications to layer on top of Gnome and Linux. These customizations made Ubuntu relatively unique among Linux distributions in that it was easy to install and use for a much larger segment of the regular populace than previous Linux distributions. If all they had done was slap Gnome on top of Linux then you would never have heard about it - that is, unless it was done at a prestigious university with a good PR department.
So, perhaps I should have been less concise and more precise in my choice of words. Perhaps I should have defined my use of the term "re-purpose" to mean "taking something that already exists in its entirety and claiming it can be used in a slightly different situation." But my point still stands. What these Rice students did is not new or novel in any way.
In addition, these students did not even solve the stated problem. The problem with sterilization in underdeveloped countries is not that they do not have a source of heat. The problem is that functioning autoclaves are A) Too expensive for distribution in all the places where they are needed; B) May not be durable enough to withstand the rigors of use in remote areas; and C) Require special tools, skills, and parts to maintain and repair which are not likely to be available in remote areas of underdeveloped countries. Simply plopping
Pardon me, but an autoclave is not a generic part that can be picked up at the local hardware store. Besides, remote areas of underdeveloped countries do not have hardware stores. So claiming anything that requires parts from YOUR local hardware store is suitable for people who have never seen a hardware store shows a complete lack of empathy for the problems of the people who make up a large part of the world's population.
So it was an engineering task? Well, then I apologize to the students for asserting that they were making this claim. But the claim is baseless, none-the-less.
jenningsthecat,
In addition, these students did not even solve the stated problem.
Fellow Rice senior MechE student here. And actually, they exactly solved the stated problem. Here are some quotes from the document explaining the project we were given when picking senior projects at the beginning of last semester:
"Problem: To come up with an appropriate design that can link a simple autoclave (shown below) to the a solarthermal device called the capteur soleil"
"The capteur soleil can provide thermal power but has not been coupled with an autoclave. The goal of this project is to achieve such a coupling. To do this, they will have to experiment with pressurized lines (like the tube which goes from the capteur to the device... in this case the autoclave). They will have to work with some sort of coil (we have several prototypes for inspection) to transfer thermal energy to the autoclave. They also may need to consider some sort of containment system for the autoclave (for cooking, another of our applications, we use the plastic drum with towels as the insulation)."
You, as some sort of software developer I'm guessing, felt quite insulted when someone insinuated that Gnome + Linux = Ubuntu was child's play. You felt it trivialized the work of a team who spent countless hours modifying code to create a simple, easily-replicated system that nearly anyone could use.
Likewise, as an engineer, your ignorance of the difficulties of coupling and interface design insult me. If it were so easy, the entire discipline of systems engineering wouldn't exist. This wasn't just putting an autoclave on a hotplate. It was a year of tireless work to create a coupling system that would be easy to install, would transfer heat effectively enough to provide sterilization even under thick cloud cover, and wouldn't fall to pieces the first time someone kicked it.
You know, this is the second post I've made here on Slashdot. The previous one was defending another Rice senior design project against people claiming it was nothing new, a trivial redesign, etc. So I hope you'll forgive me if I seem a bit annoyed when I say this: seriously, guys, we know what we're doing. If you spot something in an article that looks like a glaring hole in an engineering design, it's probably because the reporter doesn't know enough to include it, and not because we're retarded.
Everything is better with chainsaws.
The problem is not what the students did. Nor the exercise the prof assigned them. Both were good.
It's the hype that was applied to it by the university media types.
It's a fine job of fullfilling a design project. It could be useful in some situations. But saying it's "solved" the third world medical sterilization problem is a bit of a reach.
Antipater,
So, the students solved the problem stated in their assignment. I was not commenting on their ability to do their assigned engineering task. I was commenting on the article - linked to in this Slashdot post - claiming that the combination was revolutionary in some way or that it actually solved the problem of sterilizing instruments in remote areas of underdeveloped countries.
Actually, I am not a software developer. I am a former network manager. And I did not feel insulted that someone "insinuated that Gnome + Linux = Ubuntu was child's play." My claim was that Gnome + Linux does not equal Ubuntu at all. My complaint was about comparing something that takes a great deal of integration skill with something that requires nothing more than setting thing A down on top of thing B. Remember, software, by its nature is "easily replicable" in that one can easily and cheaply make copies. In the case of Ubuntu, it is also actually legal to do so. However, it is not "easily replicable" in terms of creating a new piece of software from scratch that does the same thing. Especially if one has not seen the code for the previously existing software. Ask Linus Torvolds.
This project, on the other hand, seems to be exactly the opposite. It would be easy for anyone else to take an autoclave and set it down on to a stovetop which got it's heat from some other source. However, building the device from scratch - even from existing plans - is relatively difficult. Keep in mind, I did not have access to the original assignment given to the students. Nor would anyone else had you not posted them here. My comments were based on what was written in TFA, to whit: "the Rice team's big idea was to use the steam to heat a custom-designed conductive hotplate" and "It basically becomes a stovetop, and you can heat anything you need to," thus indicating that the autoclave was simply sat down on top of said hotplate.
I should be insulted by your assumption of my ignorance as to the "difficulties of coupling and interface design" but I am not, because I know you are young and do not know better. I know full well the mathematical and mechanical difficulties involved with connecting high pressure steam pipes and achieving efficient heat transfer without leaking any of the possibly-toxin-contaminated steam into the sterile environment of an autoclave. Not to mention the craftsmanship required to actually execute such designs by hand. It is just that none of these problems were discussed in the article. The difficulties you expressed are exactly why I don't think it is a good idea to expect people in remote areas of underdeveloped countries to be able to affect repairs when necessary. Not because they are ignorant, but because they are not likely to have the necessary resources readily available. Besides, achieving an efficient heat transfer, while it may be a difficult engineering task for students, is still not the equivalent of a "revolutionary invention" that will solve a "a long-standing health issue for developing countries."
So it seems we all have a common "frenemy" as it were: the PR department at Rice. Not only are they assigning credit where credit is not due, but they are also making students look bad while doing so. Perhaps you need to talk to them about that.
Finally, I want to apologize to these students once again for assuming they were the ones making these overblown claims. In the future I will remember to turn first to the author of said overblown claims when expressing my frustration with the frequency of same.
Pardon me, but an autoclave is not a generic part that can be picked up at the local hardware store. Besides, remote areas of underdeveloped countries do not have hardware stores. So claiming anything that requires parts from YOUR local hardware store is suitable for people who have never seen a hardware store shows a complete lack of empathy for the problems of the people who make up a large part of the world's population.
Dude, chill. The problems we're discussing affect about 85% of the population of the country I live in right now.
To your points: First, that 'people who have never seen a hardware store' line is a little disingenuous. We're obviously using shorthand for generic consumer-grade materials that are readily available via standard distribution channels. Yes, there is no hardware store in the village to which these parts are destined, but it's a damn sight easier to get generic parts shipped from the nearest city (no matter how far away that might be) than it is to get a medical supply company to ship to the same place.
Second, the whole point about making an autoclave (or any other needful thing) out of generic, readily-available materials is that they are otherwise extremely difficult to source, operate, maintain and replace.
Sometimes, holding out for optimal conditions or equipment is just plain wrong. In many cases, just having something -anything at all- is often better than nothing. A friend of mine has had to perform emergency surgical procedures by the light of a Coleman lamp, so I suspect that having a quick and dirty (sorry) way of sterilising surgical materials when there's no diesel for the generator would be seen as a Good Thing, provided it worked.
The problem I have with a solar-powered version is that, in my part of the world at least, the sun is not around much at precisely the time of year when disaster is most likely to happen (i.e hurricane season). Also, it's night about half the time. If someone could find a way, for example, to heat an autoclave with a truck battery, I'd be a lot more sanguine about the prospect.
I may be mistaken or just plain wrong about how an autoclave should function, but please don't make assumptions about my experience with this kind of thing. The repercussions of a non-functioning health system is something I and my family deal with all the time.
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
Pardon me, but an autoclave is not a generic part that can be picked up at the local hardware store. Besides, remote areas of underdeveloped countries do not have hardware stores. So claiming anything that requires parts from YOUR local hardware store is suitable for people who have never seen a hardware store shows a complete lack of empathy for the problems of the people who make up a large part of the world's population.
Dude, chill. The problems we're discussing affect about 85% of the population of the country I live in right now.
Which is exactly why you should be paying more attention to what is actually claimed in some of these arguments. I say thing A and people keep arguing about thing B, which distracts from the actual facts of this issue. Rice University's PR claimed their students had "invented" a "revolutionary" solution to the problem of sterilization of medical instruments when they had, in fact done nothing of the sort. While it may be a good thing to design useful devices such that they can be made out of commonly available parts, this is not, repeat NOT, what these students did. Based on the article which triggered my complaint, the students simply sat an existing autoclave - likely normally only available from a medical supply house - down onto a steam powered hot-plate. As it turns out this is not what they did. Instead they created a custom designed and manufactured coupling along with some heat transfer coils to apply high-temp, high-pressure steam to an existing autoclave - again, likely normally only available from a medical supply house. A tough student engineering project, but still not a revolutionary invention.
What has me completely flummoxed is why every time I reiterate this point someone chimes in and says that some other thing that has no bearing on this issue is a good thing and therefore I am wrong to state that the students did not invent anything new. I say "Thing A is not a new invention" and people respond with "But Thing B is good" even when Thing B has absolutely nothing to do with the issue at hand. I agree, Thing B is a good thing. But neither I nor the Rice students said or did anything remotely near Thing B and that is one of the reasons why Thing A is not such a great thing after all.
While I may have been generalizing some and some in these areas may have reason to feel insulted - to which I apologize - I can't see how you could claim I am being "disingenuous." The word means to intentionally mislead in a subtle manner, not to simply be wrong.
Actually, I was responding to a single individual. He/she spoke of a local hardware store. I was trying to get him/her to see that it is more difficult to get repair parts than he/she may think. In addition, the parts designed by the Rice students cannot be obtained anywhere. They were custom machined. And, from other comments, it seems it took quite a long time to make them. So, while it is important that parts for any solution to the sterilization problem should be readily available - just as you said - neither the article under discussion, nor the actual project inaccurately described in that article, did much of anything to make said parts less expensive or more readily available.