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Interviews: Ask Dr. Tarek Loubani About Creating Ultra-Low Cost Medical Devices
Tarek Loubani is an emergency medicine physician who works as a
consultant doctor in the emergency departments in London, Canada and Shifa Hospital in Gaza. He is also an assistant
professor at the Department of Medicine at the University of Western
Ontario. Tarek has been working in Gaza for the past 5 years, where he made news recently by creating a 3D-printable, 30-cent stethoscope that is better than the world's best $200 equivalent. The need to develop free and open medical devices due to the lack of medical supplies resulting from the blockade, inspired Loubani who hopes the stethoscope is just the beginning of replacing expensive proprietary medical tools. Tarek has agreed to answer any questions you might have. As usual, ask as many as you'd like, but please, one question per post.
Most activities that can be performed commercially but which can also be performed non-commercially are either exempt from patents or never get prosecuted. Fixing other people's bicycles, writing a book, and performing music come to mind. (Software development is a grey area.) But 3D printing is taking an activity where efficient production on any reasonable scale was pretty much the exclusive domain of businesses, and making it accessible to DIY-ers and people who would do it while doing their job or performing some task at home, without any direct commercial aspect. Any idea what stage the debate is at regarding patent restrictions on printing or distributing designs for things more complicated or more modern than stethoscopes?
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It seems there are a lot of restrictions on what can be imported into gaza as there is a risk technologies might fall into terrorist hands and used for nefarious purpose. Under this, is it really possible to import a 3D printer into gaza for such tasks?
A significant amount of the effort on a medical device is the 510k submission
That particular stumbling block doesn't apply to 95% of the planet.
This guy was inspired by his work in Gaza.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
While reviewing the online repository for the stethoscope design, I saw that mainly it's the sound gathering part that is 3D printed. The rest is - reasonably - made out of regular stuff. So then, with some regular stuff, can't local people figure out how to make stethoscopes? They really can't figure out that one sound gathering piece? It takes a doctor/hacker to come from some land far away bearing the URL to a 3D printable part to solve the problem?
With all the allergies to various materials, such as nickle and latex, what materials can be 3d-printed that are medically inert? Surgical instruments are stainless steel, implants are titanium, how do you print these? It seems another whole line of questions to find proper materials that can be printed.