This Is How College Students Are Using 3D Printing to Help the World
In their presentation at the Penn State 2018 Supply Chain Pitch Contest, members of the social venture project Kijenzi told the story of Samuel, a man who farms tomatoes in Kenya.
Samuel woke up one morning with symptoms of the flu. He visited the local medical clinic to be tested for malaria, a disease that can be deadly if it’s not treated. The clinic, however, could not process the test because its microscope’s adjustment knob was broken. Samuel faced a quandary. He could try the next nearest clinic, which was several days’ travel away, or wait for three weeks for a replacement knob to arrive.
That’s when Kijenzi, a multi-disciplinary group of Penn State students, intervened. The group is developing ways to create medical equipment from 3D printers and an application that would allow a user to operate a 3D printer from a mobile phone, bypassing a computer. In Samuel’s situation, they designed and printed a replacement knob in one day, and it cost only 4 cents.
“Just like that, we had an entire wall of thousand-dollar microscopes that were functional again,” Kijenzi member Akhil Pothana told the Penn State news department.
How it started
Kijenzi began at Michigan Technological University with professor John Gershenson and a team of students. Co-founder Benjamin Savonen moved the project to Penn State when he and teammate Tobias Mahan enrolled in the university to work on their doctorates and Gershenson moved there to lead the school’s Humanitarian Engineering and Social Entrepreneurship (HESE) program. As such, it made sense for the group to re-establish Kijenzi.
The project has merged two visions for using technological innovation to solve medical supply issues in the developing world. Originally, the team’s goal was to build an online database of medical parts that could be made with a 3D printer. The vision expanded in 2017 to add an Android application that would connect the online database with 3D-printer capability. This would allow medical workers in developing countries to print medical equipment that can be hard to come by — some items as basic as tweezers — directly from their mobile phones.
Kijenzi is a unique combination of students from different disciplines working together to solve a global problem. The team expanded in 2018, as the idea grew from software development into a venture that drew students from other disciplines to help with market research, customer discovery, financial issues, and business model. The group’s founders began pitching their ideas in college classes and competitions as they saw the large-scale impact it could have in the developing world — an app that will run a 3D printer from a mobile phone is an unexplored technology.
“The fact that this is not something that’s been done a million times [is rewarding],” Chandler Goewert, an information sciences and technology major who works on the project, told the Penn State news department. “We’re actually doing something that is somewhat innovative.”
An affordable solution
Kijenzi’s work addresses two major problems in health care in the developing world: supply and affordability. Often, items such as glasses frames and tweezers, which are readily available in the developed world, are hard to find in developing countries. Other basic yet hard-to-find items, such as umbilical cord clamps, can save lives when medical professionals have them on hand. In the developed world, hospitals are stocked with these items.
According to Penn State News, 3D printers can make umbilical cord clamps cheaply and quickly. Use of the clamps decreases the risk of newborns contracting an infection of the umbilical cord that kills as many as 4 million infants each year. Clubfoot braces, another device made cheaply on a 3D printer, can help children who are born with feet twisted out of their natural position.
The technology will allow medical professionals in Africa to create the medical equipment that they need for their communities rather than dealing with the hassle and true barrier of ordering and waiting for parts to be shipped to their clinics. One of the biggest needs, as Samuel’s story illustrates, is parts for microscopes, which help detect malaria, one of the deadliest diseases in the world. In many situations, broken microscopes sit on shelves unused, delaying or denying accurate diagnosis of a disease that can be treated.
In the spring of 2018, members of Kijenzi took a three-week trip to Western Kenya to test their system and train local stakeholders in how to use it. While there, they also finalized their business model and located local businesses that could house 3D printers and create medical equipment for hospitals. The team talked with businesses ranging from small printing stalls to computer repair stores to cyber cafes.
Looking forward, the Kijenzi team wants to expand its work to solve other types real-world problems, such as manufacturing and farming in developing countries, where supply chains also are an issue.
“Our end goal is to bring 3D printing to everybody,” Goewert told Penn State News.
