Understandably, due to high research and development costs and market factors, an innovative medical device almost always carries a high premium price. This causes the equipment to be unattainable to many who are impoverished and live in rural areas, widening the gap of the discrepancy between the care provided to patients of different social classes.
Our tentative project is to establish the Low-Cost Medical Device Competition. This competition will provide real-world problems to current high school, undergraduates and postgraduate students. Then the participants, along with their mentors who are stakeholders from healthcare industries for example Mediplus, Medtronic and Medart Technology, to develop alternative medical devices with significantly lower costs than existing products. It is shaped in a way to be a month-long incubator programme where participants and mentors exchange their knowledge before sending their ideas off to the judges which will be the local healthcare providers.
The primary target outcome of this competition would be to produce a low-cost medical device while encouraging the use of sustainable and recyclable materials, making these technologies more accessible to a larger group of people.
Moreover, we would like to refine current mechanisms and materials used for medical devices to improve their quality by bringing in fresh ideas from a range of age groups. Finally, we would also want to promote inclusivity among the generations whereby they do not only focus on the status quo when developing medical devices.
We plan to have further implications of the winning designs by sending these medical devices to rural areas while ensuring quality control of the device. We also plan to produce an ecosystem of volunteer healthcare workers who aid residents in those rural areas in terms of utilising these medical devices.