This summer I traveled to Roosevelt Hospital in Guatemala to gather design ideas for the coming school year for Engineering World Health’s WUSTL Chapter. This is an engineering design student group from the Danforth Campus co-founded by Charles Wu and me and our mission is to inspire, educate, and empower the biomedical engineering community to globally improve health care delivery. More specifically, we are passionate and dedicated students who want to innovate new medical devices to make them cheaper and accessible. Our program is a year round intensive program in which engineering teams commit to designing an engineering solution to a specific global health problem.
But first, every engineer needs to understand the needs of the people they are serving. Luckily, our sister engineering group, the Washington University Guatemala Initiative (WUGI), recently started a program to repair medical equipment in Guatemala. We took this opportunity to spend an intense week in Guatemala, taking notes of every experience in the hospital and talking to as many medical professionals as we could about the problems they face every day.
Read the full blog in Engineering World Health: Washington University in St. Louis Chapter Goes to Guatemala