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Cheap, 3D-Printed Stethoscope Challenges Top-of-the-Line Model
mask.of.sanity writes: Tarek Loubani, an emergency physician working in the Gaza strip, has 3D-printed a 30-cent stethoscope that beats the world's best $200 equivalent as part of a project to bottom-out the cost of medical devices. Loubani together with a team of medical and technology specialists designed the stethoscope and tested it against global standard benchmarks, finding it out performed the gold-standard Littmann Cardiology 3. They now intend to make a range of ultra-low cost medical devices for the developing world.
It cost about US$10,000 to develop, and has been released as an open source model for anyone to use. Loubani says the project is following the footsteps of the free software movement and aims to replace expensive proprietary solutions. He hopes that within 25 years the devices will be common-place in the Third World, and be the "Apache of the medical world."
It cost about US$10,000 to develop, and has been released as an open source model for anyone to use. Loubani says the project is following the footsteps of the free software movement and aims to replace expensive proprietary solutions. He hopes that within 25 years the devices will be common-place in the Third World, and be the "Apache of the medical world."
My doctor doesn't, he uses an electronic device. Not sure what it is called.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Will the patients see any of this reduced cost?
Or will it go straight to higher profits?
Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
if you ignore the amortized cost of the 3-d printer, the wages to the 3-d printer operator, the electricity to run the 3-d printer, the lease for the building where the 3-d printer resides, and all sorts of other overhead.
Because it was 3D printed.
Are physicians everywhere falling over thesmelves to spend 30 cents on this replacement which "out performed the gold-standard"?
If not, why not?
I expect it's good. But there is marketing, and then there is independent testing.
He is so confident of the device that he expects the peer-review process to be a "cake walk".
Ah. Yeah I'm that confident about all the shit I produce too. So confident that I announce how great my product is before the irrelevant detail of peer review.
Dude, if a wooden tube was good enough for Laennec then a 30-cent, 3D-printed stethoscope is good enough today.
I can only assume that Littmann is the Monster of medical equipment.
If it's such a good design, then get some factory in China to injection mould 10,000s of them for pennies.
If we assume that the part could be produced via injection molding (not always true for odd geometries), then we still have the issue of distribution --
How do you get those 10,000 parts to the people who need them? Do you mail them out individually to all of the doctors that need them? Do you ship cases of them to NGOs and then let them distribute them?
There's still going to need to be *some* distribution from the 3D printer to the doctor, but as the printers become more wide-spread, the odds of the doctor having access to one goes up. With the ability to print prosthetic parts, I would hope that hospitals would be some of the early adopters ... this just might help a new hospital that isn't already kitted out w/ stethoscopes to justify the purchase.
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
I'm not a doctor, I don't know any, at least any that would be interested in trying (there's no way any doctor in my area would verify on his or her own that this works), but I'm still willing to try out this project myself. You know, for grins.
That having been said, people seem to be developing projects left and right and bending over backwards to make 3D printing a thing.
I can't say whether or not it will be, but it's a lot of fun trying to figure it out.
Some people don't believe in fairies. I don't believe in The Patriarchy.
I suspect that $0.30 cost is just the materials used in making it. Add in design costs, buying the machine, hiring people to watch over the machines, HR, accounting, sales, and support, that stethoscope can easily cost a full $3.00.
If you look at the photo of the stethoscope, it looks like they are using a Littmann diaphragm. I have a Littmann Cardiology 2 (purchased over 20 years ago) and it is a very sensitive stethoscope. I would certainly be willing to put this new cheaper device through its paces to see how it measures up in clinical use. Also, I wonder how much of the scope they really manufactured on their own - the stems for the ear pieces are still metal from the picture, and I doubt they 3D printed the tubes, so it looks like they're only really making the sound chamber.
Granted, the sound chamber and diaphragm are the critical components and the most expensive.
I suspect with inexpensive tubes and earpieces/stems, they could bring the price of the entire scope down to about $5 each, which is still cheaper (and higher quality) than the el-cheapo scopes you see new nurses carrying.
The reason a littmann is made of thick heavy materials is because hearing the subject is a whole lot easier than keeping outside noise out. I'd imagine a plastic head would be subject to a lot of outside noise.
One advantage to 3D printing and modelling is that the device can be optimized. They can dynamically change things such as the shape and thickness of materials and inner chamber and then determine whether it made a difference or not. And, they can do it cheaply. I wonder, can they reuse the plastic from earlier models?
More power to them for doing this. As I haven't had time to read the article, are they publishing their design as open source?
What do you think a single patient's share of this $200 equipment that a doctor buys once?
My wife is a veterinarian (graduated UC Davis) and has found that expensive stethoscopes are not as helpful as having significant experience with your stethoscope. She has used an inexpensive device to pick up very faint heart murmurs and other issues that others were not able to detect with their expensive devices. I would suggest that consistency is the most important aspect of creating these stethoscopes, so that if a physician develops a significant amount of experience with one, they could switch to another device without much trouble.
The cost of medical care really does threaten to burst the US economy and the solutions are complex rather than simple. Here we have a great example of a medical device being created really inexpensively. It is a precursor of what must follow. If we can make all of the medical equipment much more inexpensively we can have more hospitals and clinics without the need for enormous funding, loans, etc.. If we follow that path we may be able to create medical schools which are not expensive to attend such that a would be doctor does not have to sink into severe debt to get his training. That should shrink his fees quite a bit as well. Obviously both technology as well as strict government oversight will be needed to reduce the cost of pharmaceuticals. In other words we can not start at the end point of the expense path and get costs down without brutal actions. But if we lower the price of the entire medical pathway we can have top notch medical care at a tiny cost compared to what we pay these days.
I am surprised that the git appears to only offer molds for making silicone ear pieces. I am not going to deny that the silicone earpiece is likely superior both for comfort and for ambient noise elimination. It seems like having additions options available would be important.
If these are being printed in a resource poor area a set of ear tubes that have ball ends built directly onto them so added material resources of liquid silicone is not necessary would seem to be an essential! Of course several diameters would be required since not all ears are the same size. Yes, this will prove to be a duplication of parts, but the cost of having an alternate design available is minimal, especially if it means that the device is more readily useable.
Availability of the diaphragm plastic is happily not essential as a stethoscope without a diaphragm will still perform better than an ear pressed to the patient.
A noble project. Stethoscopes are used for listening to the heart and lungs, the abdomen for digestion/gas sounds, taking blood pressure, and likely more.
Phil
Laugh, it's good for you!
Decent quality disposable injection molded plastic stethoscopes are available for less than $1, packaged sterile, make part of the need here difficult to accept. I am sure the sound quality on a disposable stethoscope is not even similar to a Littmann cardio III.
Laugh, it's good for you!
Personally, I buy hand tools for their durability and not necessarily their technical details. I want stuff that will last for decades and give reasonable results because I don't want to waste my time running out to the store to replace a broken tool.
If the $200 stethoscope lasts forever under normal use and the $0.30 version is easily broken in your pocket, give me the $200 version. If there is a $50 version that is nearly the best but works for my application and won't break on me every few weeks, I'll take that.
Sometimes cheap is just cheap.... Sometimes cheap really means disposable.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
The medical device space is ripe for Uberization. A high-end hearing aid contains perhaps a hundred dollars worth of electronics, but in the US market sells for $4000 and more because it's a sacred "medical device" that manufacturers have special legal rights to force Americans to pay the highest prices in the world for. Introduce medical electronics priced relative to real cost in the BRIC countries, and the market will explode to such an extent that US healthcare will have no choice but to let them in even before Rand Paul's second term.
I'm betting some top-secret clauses in the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership will make such noble endeavors outright criminal.
One property of a metal stethoscope that a printed plastic one may have trouble replicating: the specific heat of metal. It is unlikely that the experience of a properly chilled metal 'scope can be replicated using plastic.
Have gnu, will travel.
Their stated goal is to get under $4. That's not actually that impressive. There is a metal Stethoscope available on Amazon right now (with free shipping) for $4.99.
Note that the cost of a good stethoscope isn't generally about performance. An ear horn is almost as good as the "gold standard" Littmann Cardio 3. The point of a good stethoscope (in the eyes of american doctors) in that is reliable, it last forever, and IT IS COMFORTABLE FOR THE DOCTOR.
Think of hairdryers. You can often pick them up at the $1 store, a $5 hairdryer is probably the same wattage as a professional hairdresser's hair drier, so why the expensive tool? Because it's the tool of their trade and the cost doesn't matter as compared to the convenience of the tool.
Similarly, any other professional (mechanic, plumber, etc) often has fairly high priced tools simply because the cheap tools break/wear-out/aren't as convenient when it is something you use 8 hours a day. (everyone with a $100+ keyboard, raise their hand).
When hundreds of medical devices are available for 3D printing, then remote areas with a 3D printer will have access to what they need, when they need it.
If only a few parts are available, purchasing and maintaining a 3D printer is a waste. Until more things are available to print, mass produced parts will be cheaper and probably much better.
$10k to develop this thing. Give me a Littman stethoscope, a $10 Harbor Freight digital caliper, and some free CAD software (DesignSpark Mechanical) and I'll have a copy rolling off my printer in about an hour. OK, maybe 3 hours if I have to modify the design a little and print a few test pieces.
The $10K probably included the cost of buying a 3D printer, a Solidworks license, and paid training for both.
If it is truly better and cheaper, it will eventually be used here in the U.S. If interns or residents can spend $200 on a stethoscope or a few bucks and the stethoscope is better, what product do you think they will buy. If older doctors need to replace their stethoscopes, they would buy the cheaper ones also. At least I would if I were a physician.
So many of these articles that proclaim how inexpensive it is to produce things with 3-D printing technology completely misrepresent the true cost.
That 30 cents figure is probably just for the materials. It doesn't consider the development cost (which in this case may be donated, but in many cases must be amortized across every piece produced), the cost of production equipment (also to be amortized), employment of production labor, distribution costs, marketing, overhead, and any number of other real business expenses above and beyond materials costs.
Realistically, I would expect this to have a market price in the low 10s of USD, not "30 cents." That puts in the range of pretty much every stethoscope available. The typical third-world MD isn't going to have a 3-D printer at her disposal.
Give me my freedom, and I'll take care of my own security, thank you.
So why is there no pic? must be baaaad
Both their description and yours sounded like they are actually building a Bowles stethoscope. Depends on the head design...which i would like to see...damn Slashdot taking cues from MSN now and leave out the relevant picture/video.
While you can cut out a diaphragm (and I have!) it is much cheaper to buy em. Cutting out accurate circles sucks, takes a dollar in labor for a $.79 piece.
Their price excludes everything but the most basic parts. Which probably don't cost much more than what they made and might be cheaper cause that filament isn't cheap is it? Where does this dirt poor hospital that can't even buy $5 stethoscopes get a 3D printer and filament?