Tourniquets are used to make it easier to take blood samples from patients. If they are used on multiple patients there is a risk that they could transmit a potentially harmful infection. There are many disposable tourniquets available, but this group of junior doctors found that they were being re-used. They invented a new single-use disposable tourniquet that could help prevent hospital acquired infections.
First in a series of films looking at the technologies that could most effect health care in the future. In this first one Prof. Josh Silver from the Centre for Vision in the Developing World introduces adjustable eyewear that can be made for £1 and fitted by patients themselves..
Gentamicin is an antibiotic that is widely used in hospitals, but calculating the correct dose to give to patients can cause problems for doctors. One junior doctor, Imran Qureshi, used his computer science background to create a simple to use gentamicin calculator.
Community led total sanitation may not sound like the most cutting edge medical science, but the potential impact of this initiative is huge. Contact with faeces spreads human disease, and this technique helps villagers around the world understand how the practice of open defecation means that they’re, literally, in the shit.
During the swine flu pandemic, google showed that it was able to track the spread using the searches that it’s users were making. In this video Dr Patty Kostkova shows her work using twitter – and how the data from that could be used to track future epidemics.
When it comes to doing epidemiological studies, numbers matter. We find out about the UK’s biobank – a project to collect information and samples from 500,000 volunteers, which should help scientists look for links between lifestyle and health.
