The future of healthcare: do-it-yourself medical devices

As the U.S. healthcare system changes, there is a big push to reduce wasteful spending and empower patients to be more involved in their own healthcare. Jose Gomez-Marquez is working to do just that.

Jose heads up the Little Devices Lab at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It doesn’t look like your typical MIT lab. It’s filled with Legos, toy parts and 3D printers. Here, his team of 8 create medical device prototypes. They take apart expensive medical devices and find ways to rebuild them using less expensive components, like toy parts.  “When we started to teardown toys alongside medical devices, we realized they had a lot in common,” says Jose. “…small, very precise, widely manufactured parts. They are also highly regulated because of safety for children.”

For example, Jose is working on a prototype of a spoon that can track how fast a person is eating. He built the spoon using inexpensive parts, running off a $10 arduino. The retail price of the same spoon would be about $100. “What do you need to make that same device happen and how do we publish a recipe so everyone can go to their Radio Shack and make it happen?” said Jose. So he’s creating open-sourced “recipes” for safe, inexpensive medical devices that people can make at home.

He’s not just trying to empower people at home. He also wants to impact the medical community. His initial goal was to find new ways to collaborate with doctors and nurses in developing countries to build medical devices they don’t normally have access too – with toy parts. One of their more successful “hacks” was to take the electronics out of a toy gun and adapt it on an IV pole to make an IV alarm. But about a year ago, Jose realized those same types of inexpensive medical devices are needed right here in America. “We recognize affordability is now interesting in America in terms of healthcare,” said Jose.

Jose is focusing his efforts on a collaboration with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation in a new program called “MakerNurse.” He’s teaching American nurses to find cheap, safe, quick ways to treat their patients using his prototypes. One example of his work is with a nebulizer, or the cup a doctor will put over a patient’s nose and mouth to help them breathe. They normally cost around $80 but Jose found a way to make one for $7 dollars – by connecting the breathing cup to a hose, which is then connected to a bicycle pump. Inexpensive, and you don’t need electricity, which some nurses are already saying could have been helpful during the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy. “There’s no reason why we should be overpaying and no reason why we should be beholden to somebody else’s design,” says Jose.”

The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation sees value in the way Jose approaches healthcare. “I think that fundamentally Jose’s mission is to ensure that as many individuals across our city, across our country have access to health environments and healthcare,” said Lori Melichar, Team Director for the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

He’s not the only one who thinks innovation can solve some long-term healthcare problems. “We face a crisis in our healthcare system. A crisis of healthcare costs that are rising at an unsustainable rate. We face a crisis, frankly, in terms of the quality and safety of our healthcare,” says Dr. Farzad Mostashari, the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. “And we need those tinkerers, and those tweakers, those engineers and innovators, those mad scientists. We need them to turn their passion and creativity to healthcare.”

It will take some time for Jose’s ideas and prototypes to take root in the medical community, but it’s already starting. Some major players in the healthcare industry are starting to pay close attention to his work. “Healthcare companies are coming around and pharmaceutical companies are engaging us in ways they haven’t before.”