Description of Session
In developing countries, access to appropriate laboratory equipment is a major constraint to effective surveillance of infectious disease and antibiotic resistance. Even when equipment is available, it is often not appropriate to the local context – too easily broken, intolerant of the local electric grid, not locally serviceable, etc. But emerging tools and approaches in the design and implementation of hardware create the possibility of a new paradigm in diagnostic tools: open source lab equipment created for users in diverse contexts using human centered design. In this session, Rob Ryan-Silva from the DAI Maker Lab will demonstrate how open source laboratory hardware can shift long-standing assumptions about who can do sophisticated laboratory work, and where. He will introduce some of the existing open source designs for equipment and discuss how those designs can be integrated into real-world programming. This session is paired with a TED-style talk where Rob will give a broader overview and introduce the concept.
