THE FIRST “UBORA” DESIGN SCHOOL OF NAIROBI: A ONE-WEEK INTENSIVE AND INTERNATIONAL “CDIO”EXPERIENCE CENTERED ON MEDICAL DEVICES

Abstract

UBORA is an educational and design online platform or infrastructure aimed at the collaborative development of open-source medical devices (OSMD) to address current and future global healthcare challenges. It pretends to help medical professionals and related industries with new methods for creation of innovative solutions that take into account patients’ needs, safety, feasibility, efficacy and performance. In our quest towards universal healthcare, in which we expect UBORA to play an important supporting role, teaching-learning actuations constitute an essential foundation. In consequence, in parallel to the creation of UBORA as co-design resource, international design schools and competitions are being developed. In this study we present the results from the “First UBORA Design School”, held in Nairobi in December 2017.

This “First UBORA Design School” has placed students from several European and Africa universities and countries in an international context of collaboration and learning. The school has been implemented with the CDIO methodology in mind and with the challenging objective of making teams of students live through complete “conceive-design-implement-operate” processes, linked to innovative medical devices (focused in this edition on child and maternal health), in just one week. The school has been prepared with a set of morning lessons linked to: patients’ needs and global health concerns, engineering design methodologies, standardization and safety issues, prototyping and manufacturing topics, socio-economic aspects of the medical industry; and with the support of more specific afternoon workshops connected with: creativity promotion techniques, high-level programming, medical signals and sensors, massproduction processes, among others. Hands-on activities including: the conceptual design of the biomedical projects, the computer-aided design and modeling of the proposed solutions, materials and manufacturing processes selection tasks, rapid prototyping and testing, among others, have been performed and discussed in the late afternoons and evenings, mainly between the students, but also with the continued support of professors and mentors. Final presentations of results and discussions with the jury have served as key assessment procedure.

Main benefits, lessons learned and future challenges, linked to these international medical device design schools, are analyzed and discussed, taking account of the available results from this first implementation, so as to improve towards the future editions. The next one will be held in Pisa in summer 2018.