MIT IIH Nicaragua

Saturday, we had another round of focus groups in Esteli, which a small city about 2 hours north of Managua. It’s home to a nursing school and a major hub of CARE’s health care projects. The reaction to the kits was positive, but there was more stratification among ranks (student nurses, nurses, teacher nurses, med students, doctors, MIT students, MIT wannabe students). Nicaragua like most of Latin America respects rank and age, which can lead to some interesting group dynamics. In such a scenario, a professor of nursing looks at the diagnostic kit, says a 12-syllable word like procalcitonina or gonadotropina coriónica humana and the rest of the classroom kneels in awe. The reality is that they don’t really why the procalcitonina does what it does, so they are not prone to hacking it. The students don’t know any better and some of them seem keen on taking a second look at the problem. We are coming up with ideas on how to level conversation:

• Everyone goes by their first name
• We can get T-shirts for people
• Active re-mixing—people are shy here. It’s easy for a dominant personality to have all the fun for themselves during an exercise
• Separate them by age cohort

Lisa and Anna conducted the drug delivery focus group and they had a different set of experiences that will be covered later.

Success!

The IADB came to Managua to visit our project and promote their initiative on People with Disabilities. Having a smart and dedicated team is worth its weight in laser cutters. Lisa, Anna and Phil started the week taking charge of every little detail, drawing an even bigger picture for the project each day of the week.

It was a rough week. The conference deadline and the attention were stressful. On top of that, the team had to deal with power failures for two days straight, which left us without AC (one of the basic elements of life down here). Our Fedex package got delayed in customs, we had to invent a things on the fly, Jose kept breaking every piece of electronics he touched. The lab is very much in the spirit of the lab at home: THINGS ARE ALL OVER THE PLACE.

It’s actually organized into different modules, but until Thursday night, it looked was just technology potpourri sprinkled among 6 tables. By Friday, we had it well organized into a sensible set of 3 distinct kits with specific exercises that visitors could practice on.

Anna, Phil and Lisa outdid themselves. You can’t buy the level of interest and dedication that results in 3 people producing a toy table that doubles as a nebulizer, a teddy bear that takes your oxygen saturation, an array of puzzle pieces that produce an array of diagnostic combinations depending on how you put them together, and a branding and marketing campaign that would make Madison jealous. Even the IV tubes had IIH logos.

So when Friday finally came around, a tired, bleary eyed posse of IIHers showed the our partners, visitors and the press an array of technologies that starting to reflect our vision of appropriate medical technology tools.   I will still keep on breaking things, losing things, and missing track of time. My team will still keep fixing them, coming up with new ones, finding them for me, and making sure we keep going.