If your house is like mine, and you have lots of toys laying around that your kids no longer play with, perhaps there is another option besides sending them off to Goodwill.
Jose Gomez-Marquez, director of the Director of the IIH (Innovations in International Health) Lab at MIT, is heading up MIT’s Little Devices group, dedicated to design, invention, and policy toward DIY health technologies. Created with the healthcare needs of the developing world in mind, the MEDIKit (Medical Education Design and Invention Kit) allows medical professionals to design their own medical devices using easy-to-assemble modular components. The MEDIKit allows users to customize and quickly assemble medical devices that address the challenges of work environments in many developing nations.
MEDIKits are designed to demonstrate that such high cost equipment may be more of a luxury than a necessity by teaching medical staff to adopt other, potentially cheaper technologies to accomplish the same purpose. LEGOs can be used as breadboards to create wet lab circuits, a bicycle pump can be adapted into a nebulizer for asthmatic patients, Gomez-Marquez and his team really believe the possibilities are limited only by users’ ingenuity.
What could you design out of your children’s toys? All it takes is a little creativity. Look at it this way, you can either do something inventive to help humanity, or plan a garage sale, which I know I certainly don’t have the patience for.