Wide Angle: Surgery Light, MacGyver-Style
May 04, 2009
Periodic power outages are more than just annoying. They're dangerous, especially if one happens in the middle of surgery. Enter the pie-plate-bike-part-LED-battery lamp, designed by a University of Michigan student group.
Michigan Health Engineered for ALL Lives, or M-HEAL, designs and repairs medical equipment in the developing world. A team led by engineering student Stephen DeWitt came up with a lamp prototype that can switch to battery power for short-term outages and could be hooked up to solar systems or hand cranks during longer ones. (Hat tip to GOOD magazine's blog.)
The students wanted to incorporate existing resources into their design and noticed that China was exporting a large number of LEDs to Sub-Saharan Africa. Their lamp connects eight LEDs to a pie pan for the light source. A automotive rear-view mirror serves as a joint connecting the pie pan to a bike break on the arm so the lamp head can be adjusted up and down. The whole thing costs about the same as a hand-held flashlight, which is what medical personnel have to resort to when the lights cut out mid-suture.
"Our end goal is to distribute plans to these lamps so anyone in developing countries can start building these lamps on their own," DeWitt says in a video about the project. Currently the lamp is being tested in Uganda. Using pie pans for the greater good is such a sweet idea.
Photo: Members of the M-HEAL lamp team with their prototype.
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