Tag Archives: Massachusetts Institute of Technolog

TED 2014 ‘pre’ opening with prosthetics made better by 3D printing, interdisciplinary network, an app for vision testing and the Internet of Things made open

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Here’s today’s (March 17, 2014) second session and a list of the fellows along with a link to their TED 2014 biography (list and links from the TED 2014 schedule),

Somi Kakoma Vocalist + Composer + Culturist
Steve Boyes conservation biologist
David Sengeh biomechatronics engineer
Eric Berlow Ecologist
Uldus Bakhtiozina photographer + visual artist
Laurel Braitman science historian + writer
Eman Mohammed Photojournalist
Andrew Bastawrous eye surgeon + innovator
Kathryn Hunt Paleopathologist
Ayah Bdeir Engineer and artist
Will Potter Investigative journalist
Kitra Cahana Vagabond photojournalist + conceptual artist
Shih Chieh Huang Artist

David Moinina Sengeh, from the MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) Media Lab, focuses on biomechatronics and, more specifically, prosthetics. He was born and raised (till age 12?) in Sierra Leone where a civil war raged from 1991 to January 2002 when the war was declared finished. One of the legacies from the war has been war amputees resulting in a need for prosthetics and Sengher’s commitment to creating better prosthetics.

Even in wealthy parts of the world, an amputee may experience great discomfort from wearing a prosthetic that despite a number of fittings and adjustments never feels right and causes blisters and sores. In countries with fewer resources, getting a prosthetic that fits well is even more unlikely.

Sengeh has worked out a new way to create prosthetics that fit better and feel better, using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to scan the residual limb more accurately, followed by a finite-element analysis, then utilizing computer-aided design to create a  multilayer 3-D printed variable-resistance socket. One of Sengeh’s test subjects described his prosthetic socket as feeling like ‘pillows’. (You can read more about Sengeh and his work at MIT in a Dec. 18, 2012 MIT article by David L. Chandler.)  Sengeh has also founded a program in Sierra Leone to encourage and foster home-grown innovation and solutions in situations where resources are limited.

Andrew Bastawrous, Research Fellow in International Eye Health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, talked about his work in Kenya where he has developed an app for vision testing and diagnosis with an inexpensive device which can be clipped onto a smartphone. He demonstrated the app, Peek Vision, during his presentation.

The whole thing reminded me of Aravind, another project designed to save sight, but this one was created in India, from the Aravind Wikipedia entry (Note: Links have been removed),

Aravind Eye Care Hospital is an ophthalmological hospital with several locations in India. It was founded by Dr. Govindappa Venkataswamy in 1976. Since then it has grown into a network of eye hospitals that have seen a total of nearly 32 million patients in 36 years and performed nearly 4 million eye surgeries, the majority of them being very cheap or free. The model of Aravind Eye Care hospitals has been applauded all over the world and has become a subject for numerous case studies.[1] [2][3]

My last fellow description for this session features Ayah Bdeir and the Internet of Things.  Bdeir has developed a modular approach to creating your own electronics and, today (March 17, 2014) she was introducing a new module, the Cloud Module which would allow you to create your own internet of things. (Last week I covered a webinar with Tim O’Reilly and Jim Stogdil in a March 13, 2014 posting where they discussed big data, the Internet of Things, maker culture and other components of an upcoming Solid Conference. OReilly & Stogdil discussed two options for the Internet of Things, a proprietary approach or an open  approach.) Bdeir’s modules facilitate an open approach. Bdeir will be speaking at the Solid Conference,

Ayah Bdeir is the founder and CEO of littleBits, an award-winning library of electronics dubbed “LEGOs for the iPad generation.” Bdeir is an engineer, interactive artist, and one of the leaders of the open source hardware movement. Bdeir’s career and education have centered on advancing open source hardware to make education and innovation more accessible to people around the world.

You can find out more about littleBits and the Cloud Module here.

No need for eye drops when your contact lenses can dispense your eye medication

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Anyone who has difficulty getting or allowing drops into their eyes (I once slid out of an ophthalmologist’s examination chair trying to avoid the eye drops he was administering at the end of my appointment) is going appreciate this Dec. 9, 2013 news item on Nanowerk,

For nearly half a century, contact lenses have been proposed as a means of ocular drug delivery that may someday replace eye drops, but achieving controlled drug release has been a significant challenge. Researchers at Massachusetts Eye and Ear/Harvard Medical School Department of Ophthalmology, Boston Children’s Hospital, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are one step closer to an eye drop-free reality with the development of a drug-eluting contact lens designed for prolonged delivery of latanoprost, a common drug used for the treatment of glaucoma, the leading cause of irreversible blindness worldwide.

The Dec. 9, 2013 Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary press release (also on EurekAlert), which originated the news item, notes that a lot of people have problems with eye drops and gives a general description of the research,

“In general, eye drops are an inefficient method of drug delivery that has notoriously poor patient adherence. This contact lens design can potentially be used as a treatment for glaucoma and as a platform for other ocular drug delivery applications,” said Joseph Ciolino, M.D, Mass. Eye and Ear cornea specialist and lead author of the paper.

The contacts were designed with materials that are FDA-approved for use on the eye. The latanoprost-eluting contact lenses were created by encapsulating latanoprost-polymer films in commonly used contact lens hydrogel. Their findings are described online and will be in the January 2014 printed issue of Biomaterials.

“The lens we have developed is capable of delivering large amounts of drug at substantially constant rates over weeks to months,” said Professor Daniel Kohane, director of the Laboratory for Biomaterials and Drug Delivery at Boston Children’s Hospital.

In vivo, single contact lenses were able to achieve, for one month, latanoprost concentrations in the aqueous humor that were comparable to those achieved with daily topical latanoprost solution, the current first-line treatment for glaucoma.

The lenses appeared safe in cell culture and animal studies. This is the first contact lens that has been shown to release drugs for this long in animal models.

The newly designed contact lens has a clear central aperture and contains a drug-polymer film in the periphery, which helps to control drug release. The lenses can be made with no refractive power or with the ability to correct the refractive error in near sided or far sided eyes.

Here’s a link to and a citation for the researchers’ published paper,

In vivo performance of a drug-eluting contact lens to treat glaucoma for a month by Joseph B. Ciolino, Cristina F. Stefanescu, Amy E. Ross, Borja Salvador-Culla, Priscila Cortez, Eden M. Ford, Kate A. Wymbs, Sarah L. Sprague, Daniel R. Mascoop, Shireen S. Rudina, Sunia A. Trauger, Fabiano Cade, Daniel S. Kohane. Biomaterials Volume 35, Issue 1, January 2014, Pages 432–439 DOI: S0142961213011150

This article is behind a paywall.