Tag Archives: Medical/Hygiene

Ember, the smart coffee cup maker, enters the healthcare field with refrigerated vaccine shipping boxes

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The brand synonymous with keeping your coffee hot also wants to ensure that vaccines and other critical medicines are safely transported in the perfect cold environment.

To be honest, although the use-cases seem vastly different, Ember’s company mission statement remains the same – to harness the power of temperature control to transform how the world eats, drinks and lives. The California startup made its mark with the eponymously named Ember Mug, a slick, award-winning temperature-controlled beverage mug designed in collaboration with Ammunition Group. However, with Ember Health, the company embarks on a new venture that runs parallel to its Drinkware brand. Its debut product, the Ember Cube, is a self-refrigerated, cloud-based, trackable shipping box that’s ideal for the cold-chain logistical requirements of medicines and vaccines. Designed to be effective but also be durable and reusable, the Cube is set to offset nearly 3000 tonnes worth of medical shipping containers from entering landfills… in just the first year of its use.

Ember’s experimentation with developing battery-powered heated mugs for coffee ended up directly influencing and informing its healthcare product. The Ember Cube uses the same microprocessors, sensors, and algorithms found in the Ember mugs, but flips the parameters by ensuring the contents within stay cool instead of warm. It uses a vacuum-insulated design, lined with phase-change gel-packs on the inside that help the container’s contents stay 41°F degrees for up to 72 hours, even in warm desert-like climate conditions. However, that’s what helps the boxes retain their cool temperature. What actively cools them is a vented refrigerating system, where multiple boxes plug into a specialized rack with enough breathing room to allow air to flow through. To actively cool each box, a refrigerated mixture of water and ethanol is passed through the phase-change gel packs, bringing their temperature down to the desired value. Each individual Cube is also cloud-connected and trackable, offering a unique advantage over current traditional medical shipping boxes, while practically weighing the same as them.

The Ember Cube’s design process, described in vivid detail by Fast Company, was a bit of a challenge, considering the most obvious way to go about it was to create a plastic outer housing with a foam-lined interior that would help absorb shock and protect the precious vials on the inside. The problem with this, mentioned Ember founder and CEO Clay Alexander, was that the plastic boxes would end up getting horribly scratched and scuffed during the logistical process, looking terrible after just a few shipments. The less-obvious alternative was, however, to flip the materials inside out and use a foam exterior. The Cube’s black-box-inspired exterior now uses EPP (Expanded PolyPropylene), the same material used on the inside of bicycle helmets. This material is wonderful at absorbing shock and taking on impact, making the boxes act “like a rubber bouncing ball”, according to Alexander. “If I drop this box on its corner, there are several inches of EPP foam, and it compresses like a spring, and bounces back.”

The Ember Cube truly is a marvel of modern design and engineering. Its internal tracking systems allow you to remotely monitor its location as well as each individual cube’s temperature and humidity. The Cubes can comfortably survive a 72-hour journey, allowing them to be shipped by road, sea, or even air to any location, and once they’ve been received and their contents extracted, a simple ‘Return To Sender’ button lets the Cube alert the carrier for a pickup, while automatically generating its own shipping label and displaying it on the electronic ink display on the front. Considering how critical medical shipping can be, the Ember Cube ensures a snag-free, lag-free efficient shipping process from start to finish!

The Ember Cube comes in partnership with Cardinal Health, one of the largest distribution companies in healthcare, with a yearly revenue of $162 billion through shipping medical supplies and prescription medication to hospitals and drug stores (1/3rd of that business comes from CVS). Cardinal Health aims to have the Cube reach critical mass by the end of 2022, practically replacing up to 7 million pounds of packaging waste each year, including single-serve cardboard boxes, styrofoam protectors, and disposable ice-packs.

Designers: Ember Health & Cardinal Health

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A solar-powered weighing scale concept to help save the lives of babies in remote communities

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It’s easy to take for granted simple things like keeping track of our weight. For babies in hard-to-reach areas, however, that can be a matter of life or death, and this portable solar scale tries to help tip the scales in the baby’s favor.

The first few weeks of an infant’s life are critical not only to their growth but also to their survival. Many parents might take for granted the many tools and resources available to them in watching over babies during this crucial period, conveniences that are not even accessible to remote and socio-economically challenged communities. Even something as basic as a weighing scale for infants is rare and difficult to come by, something that this product concept is trying to solve in the most efficient way possible.

Designer: Craig McGarrell

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), about 2.4 million children around the world died within the first month of their lives. While there are many factors that contributed to this number, a very big factor in remote regions is the ability to monitor the baby’s weight during that month. Weighing scales used in these areas are often old-fashioned analog scales that can be inaccurate and too heavy to move from one community to another easily. This makes it difficult or nearly impossible for healthcare workers to keep a close watch on babies’ weights, leading to unfortunate neonatal deaths.

The ROOTS Solar Scale concept is an attempt to modernize this critical medical equipment without making them too complicated to use or too expensive to maintain. For one, it is completely digital, which removes the risk of getting inaccurate readings over time. It is also solar-powered so that electricity won’t be an issue.

The design is also meant to be lightweight and easy to carry around, even on foot, taking the form of a backpack when not in use. The weighing bowl inside creates a safe structure for the infant to lie in, while the stiff hinge prevents the lid from accidentally closing with the child still inside.

The Solar Scale is meant to be a cost-effective solution that is easy to make and repair, thanks to having very few parts. Despite relying mostly on solar power, the design isn’t completely sustainable, as it relies heavily on plastic, particularly to give the weighing bowl a smooth surface that will be gentle on the baby’s skin while also easy to clean.

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This insulin pen cap concept tries to make diabetes management less tedious

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There’s still no escaping having to prick yourself to deliver life-saving insulin, but that doesn’t mean keeping track of your diabetes data has to be stuck in the past either.

Smartwatches and fitness trackers have become a lot more sophisticated in the past few years, but there are still some medical conditions that are still outside the grasp of these devices. Accurately measuring blood pressure, for example, still requires some sort of inflatable cuff. Diabetes management is even more painful, almost literally, because of the need to draw blood and inject the medication. We’re still far from reaching that non-intrusive goal of diabetic management, but one seemingly innocuous product is trying to make that process a little bit smarter.

Designer: Luca Lili Takacs, Csilia Antal for X-Plast

Injecting insulin into the body used to require some medical know-how, but anyone with diabetes can now administer a dose on their own. There are also more alternatives these days to the typical syringes and pumps, with the insulin pen becoming to most convenient and most stylish option. All of these methods, however, still require no small amount of manual data tracking, something that the INDOO smart insulin pen caps are trying to address.

These caps look like gigantic versions of typical pen caps, which isn’t surprising given how insulin pens are equally gigantic compared to the handwriting tool. A box contains different caps designed to fit the different types of insulin pens available in the market today. This makes it easy to switch brands without having to buy a new set. The electronics part can simply be transferred from one cap to another.

The INDOO isn’t just decorative, of course, and it turns any insulin pen into a smart insulin pen. It helps with the management and tracking of doses and insulin levels, a critical activity that can mean life or death for a diabetic patient. As with any smart accessory, it has to be paired with a smartphone app that will offer notifications, warnings, and suggestions that could save the person’s life.

There are some insulin pens that are starting to offer smart features, but the INDOO offers a solution that won’t force you to change brands unless you really need to. Considering how some insulin pens do get thrown out after a period of use, these savings add up in the long run.

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This 3D printed portable toilet is made from recycled plastic!

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This sustainable toilet is designed to compost solid waste while also tackling the sanitation crisis – using design and technology to do good sh*t! It is a solution that eradicates plastic waste and turns it into a construction material that reduces the load on landfills. The portable toilet is also absolutely beautiful with its white aesthetic and cocoon form! The first 3D printed prototype was produced by an advanced seven-axis robotic printer and is being tested on a construction site in the Swiss Alps.

Created by Spanish design studio Nagami and To: it has been dubbed The Throne and it comprises three parts – a teardrop-shaped body, a dramatic, double-curved sliding door, and a bucket for solid waste. All the parts were printed within three days, including the base and some smaller accessories that were either injection-molded or ordered. It also includes an off-the-shelf separation toilet seat to separate urine from solids for composting.

For the prototype, the teams used discarded plastic medical equipment from European hospitals. “Our treatment of waste, both human and artificial, has a profound impact on the future of humanity and our planet. Since the 1950s roughly 8.3 billion metric tonnes of plastic has been produced, and only around 9% of this has been recycled; the remainder have been incinerated, piled into landfills, or dumped in our oceans,” said Nachson Mimran, CEO and co-founder of To: Creative Activists.

“The 3D printed Throne has been an incredible challenge for us, working with mechanics, sliding doors, and off-the-shelf products such as a separate toilet. These design components forced us to think in a different, utilitarian way which really makes this proof of concept special,” said Manuel Jiménez García, CEO and co-founder of Nagami.

The Throne goes further in its realization of a circular economy by composting the waste produced by users and using this compost locally. Eventually, the teams want to put the technologies and tools in the hands of local communities. When innovation is shared fairly and the carbon footprint created by logistics and shipping of these products can be greatly reduced. The Throne is just one example of the possibilities of what additive manufacturing can do for scaling sustainable design and development – it’s only waste if you waste it!

Designer: Nagami and To:

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Medical Innovations from the A’ Design Award that will revolutionize human life and healthcare

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It might sound borderline unbelievable, but some of the most life-changing innovations today actually began as ideas that were considered ridiculous back in the day. Medical history is FILLED with innovations that were initially rejected on the grounds of them seeming laughable, only to then become global standards – the washing of hands comes to mind, as it helped radically reduce maternal mortality. 19th-century Hungarian surgeon Ignaz Semmelweis was labeled as crazy for proposing that doctors wash their hands before and after surgery – today, it’s a norm not just for doctors, but for any and everyone! While I’m talking about crazy medical innovations, did you know the chainsaw was originally invented to help doctors deliver babies?? Yes, the same chainsaw you use to cut down trees! And cornflakes were originally invented as a medicine to reduce sexual drives in people, long before they became a staple breakfast item! The point is, innovation and inspiration (medical or not) can sometimes go overlooked or unregarded, although it’s best when rewarded!

‘Medical Devices and Medical Equipment Design’ forms just one of the various categories of the A’ Design Award and Competition, which spans the popular categories like Architecture, Lighting, and Consumer Electronics, as well as the obscure, lesser-known categories like Cybernetics, Prosumer Products, and Safety Apparel Design. The A’ Design Award’s ultimate goal is to be an umbrella that covers good design across all disciplines, which is why it has 100 different categories for submitting design projects, and 211 jury members (comprising academics, design professionals, and press members) from all around the world collectively judging the works. Winners of the A’ Design Award don’t just secure a trophy and a certificate but receive an entire PR Campaign dedicated towards pushing their career, clout, and even their projects to newer heights. A’ Design Award’s winners and even its participants are included in its annual award book and business network, while additionally contributing to their country’s overall design ranking that paints a holistic picture of how design-centric and design-forward each country is.

The A’ Design Award is currently accepting entries for the 2022 edition of the award program, so if you’ve even got an idea for a medical product (or any other category), now’s your time to shine and change the world!

Here are some of our favorite Medical Device and Equipment Design winners from the A’ Design Award & Competition across the years. If you have a potential medical device or equipment design that you think is worthy of an award, Click here to register & participate in the A’ Design Awards 2022. Hurry, the last date for application is the 28th of February 2022!

Dab ECG Holter Patch by Adam Miklosi

Literally, the size of a quarter, Adam Miklosi’s Dab is an unobtrusive Holter ECG/EKG that rests comfortably on your chest, constantly reading your heart’s movements. Designed to be minimal, non-invasive, and simple, the Dab tries to bridge the gap between medical appliances and wearables. Its tiny yet classy design sits on your chest via a gel patch, while the electrodes capture your heart activity. The Dab’s dry-electrodes allow it to be used and reused, while they constantly measure one’s heart activity (requiring periodic charging via their wireless charging hub), and keep logs of accurate readings, quietly sitting on your chest while you absolutely forget that they’re even there in the first place!

Gait Analysis Robot by Anri Sugihara

Here’s an idea that doctors in the 19th century would absolutely laugh at – did you know that your gait (the way you walk) could be studied to identify if you’re suffering from any diseases? It’s common knowledge that a person’s gait is so unique that they can literally be identified by them, but what this robot is attempting to do here is even more game-changing. Simply by studying and analyzing your walk, the robot can A. Detect diseases, both external and internal, and B. Track rehabilitation. It’s strange although if you think about it, maybe you subconsciously walk differently when you’ve bruised your arm or ribs, or when you’ve got a cough or an internal difficulty. The Gait Analysis robot could potentially help detect ailments and diseases using data gathered from just a 10-minute walk. Not only would it save time, it would also save a WHOLE lot of costs on expensive tests!

Espire Full Face Gas Mask by Carlos Schreib

As we enter what’s effectively our third year in this pandemic, let me be the first to say that if you wear spectacles just like I do, there’s nothing quite as annoying as an ill-fitted face mask leaking air and fogging up your glasses! The Espire Full Face Gas Mask is exactly what ALL face masks should look like. Not only does it purify the air going into your nose and mouth, it even guards your eyes against smoke, dust, and harmful chemicals. What’s more, it rather cleverly creates a barrier between the breathing zone and the viewing zone so you don’t have to worry about your visor fogging up with your breath!

Pimoji More Intuitive Pill Design by Jong Hun Choi

The concept behind the Pimoji tackles the two biggest problems of taking meds. Firstly, the ambiguity, given that almost all medicines look the same and their names are usually a complicated bunch of characters that often don’t convey anything, and secondly, the fact that the very act of taking medicines feels slightly daunting, and can often seem scary to most. The Pimoji’s solution to both those problems is simple, and between you and me, pretty innovative! Design each pill around an emoji-esque representation of the ailment they’re trying to cure. Heart meds are shaped like hearts, bone-strengthening meds are shaped like bones, toothache tablets are shaped like teeth, and the list goes on (let us know if you can correctly identify the tablet shapes!) The pills come in cute shapes that make it easy to know what medicine you’re taking, while somewhat making it feel like you’re eating fun-shaped candy, not medication!

Zhiwen Wearable Thermometer by Wei Gu And Di Wu

The Zhiwen thermometer lets you constantly monitor the temperature of its wearer using wireless technology. Designed to be small enough to permanently sit on the skin without causing much discomfort, the thermometer beams its readings to a control unit that allows you to check the wearer’s temperature, as well as the thermometer’s overall battery. When the thermometer runs out of charge, just take it off and slide it into the charging hub located right within the control unit!

Osteoid Medical Cast by Deniz Karasahin

Presenting what is essentially the future of medical rehabilitation in a nutshell, the Osteoid Medical Cast is a significant upgrade over the plaster casts still used up to today. Instead of layering wet plastered gauze onto a broken limb, the Osteoid Medical Cast proposes a neat, bespoke 3D-printed cast that’s breathable, and designed exactly to its wearer’s specifications. Using a generatively designed Voronoi surface, the new cast uses less material while still providing a strong structure, and provides openings so the skin can breathe while more importantly, allowing the patient to itch their skin!

Convenient Urine Bag by Yanqing Lan

Offering a solution that’s comfortable, convenient, and most importantly modular, the Convenient Urine Bag by Yanqing Lan straps to the wearer’s thigh, allowing them to urinate wherever they are without discomfort or pressure. The 100ml bag sports a 3-part design, with 3 individual compartments that fill up as the wearer urinates. As and when each individual bag fills up, they can be unplugged and disposed of, so the wearer/patient isn’t carrying a large sack half-filled with bodily fluids wherever they go. Each individual bag is filled with a water-absorbing polymer that can quickly solidify the urine, thereby reducing the odor and stabilizing the urine stored to prevent any unforeseen or accidental spillage.

Brave Jet Syringe by Ilmo Ahn, Jisu Kim & Juyeon Baek & SeonwooPyo

Dispelling any fear around injections, the Brave Jet Syringe gamifies the vaccination process, turning the syringe jet into a plane, allowing kids to look at it as not a pointy, fearful, medical product, but a good-guy fighter jet that kills diseases! This novel approach attaches basically to any syringe body, making kids less afraid of needles and allowing doctors to administer life-saving vaccines and treatments.

SPH Smart Prosthetic Hand by Young Jo In

The SPH, or Smart Prosthetic Hand is just practical from top to bottom. A mechanized prosthetic hand lets you go about your day to day tasks, while a smartphone is literally integrated into the back of your palm, letting you own and use a smartphone without worrying about having to occupy one hand holding one, forget/lose one, or accidentally drop one. Besides, it literally puts the power of the entire internet in your hands!

Click here to register & participate in the A’ Design Awards 2022. Hurry, the last date for application is the 28th of February 2022!

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Portable spirometer lets you track lung activity + strength, for people recovering from breathing issues

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Designed to help measure lung activity and strength while on the go, the Airpen is a small handheld pocketable spirometer that tracks how hard you can inhale/exhale. Working pretty much the way a breathalyzer does, the Airpen uses a small module with a fan inside it, which rotates when you breathe in or out. The device calculates the fan’s RPM to basically gauge how strong your lungs are. Working alongside a smartphone app that collects and creates a dashboard of your lung activity data, the Airpen hopes to help rehabilitate people with reduced lung function.

It’s a successor to the Incentive Spirometer, a relatively large device that’s used to help rehabilitate lungs after illness or surgery, keeping them flexible and free of fluid. The Airpen simply condenses it into a small device that can fit into your pocket, effectively allowing people to perform lung activity tests wherever they may be.

The Airpen is a winner of the Red Dot Design Concept Award for the year 2021.

Designers: Mitul Lad, Pietro Russomanno & Stefania Pizzichi.

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This wearable smartwatch evolves by not only measuring your blood pressure, but also storing your medication!

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The MedBot is a smartwatch concept that monitors each user’s health conditions, measures blood pressure, stores medications and pills, and sets health-specific reminders.

There’s nothing worse than leaving the house without taking your vitamins or prescription medication. Already halfway to work, suddenly you remember your time-dependent antibiotics, but there’s nothing you can do. With smart technology shacking up in every corner of our lives nowadays, there has to be a means to integrate health concerns into portable, wearable technology.

Noticing this vacant space for a solution-based design, architectural designer Batyrkhan Bayaliev produced the MedBot, a smartwatch that monitors health, stores medication, and reminds users when it’s time to take antibiotics and various pills. Intent on exploring the intersection of health and smart technology, Bayaliev created MedBot as a means for everyone to have access to their health and catalog of medications throughout the day, wherever and whenever.

Similar in fashion to an Apple Watch, Medbot maintains a sleek, inconspicuous design that leaves enough room for a storage compartment where users can keep their pills and medication. A full display screen alerts users of their health conditions, spanning from blood pressure levels to medication reminders. Just beneath the display screen, Bayaliev outfitted MedBot with a pill storage compartment that uses a sliding mechanism to open and close.

Inside the compartment, users will find three sections that can store tablets and capsules of varying sizes. The wristband itself is also adjustable by design, allowing users to loosen or tighten their grip around the wrist as needed. With integrated smart technology that alerts users when to take their medicine, measures blood pressure, and sets alarms, as well as an adjustable wrist strap, MedBot is ideal for the modern health-conscious consumer.

Designer: Batyrkhan Bayaliev

The smartwatch display screen alerts users of varying health reminders and measures blood pressure. 

Just beneath the display screen, a hidden storage compartment allows rooms for pills and medication of varying sizes and shapes.

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The FiiT face-mask is turning the protective medical device into a customizable fashion accessory

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Just like you can match a tie, watch, and cufflinks with a suit, or shoes and purse with a dress, the FiiT mask’s design features swappable parts, components, and accents that let you basically make your mask an extension of your outfit of the day.

Even though we’re pretty much turning the corner on this pandemic, the reality for most of the world is that masks are now an outdoor essential. Designed not just to protect one from diseases but to also help deal with worsening air quality, wildfire smoke, and allergens, face masks have found themselves as a standard part of people’s outfits in countries in the east, and are slowly permeating the zeitgeist in western countries… although one problem remains. Those blue surgical masks aren’t doing anyone any favors, strictly aesthetically speaking.

Designers: Flavien Hello & Matthieu Lecuyer

Click Here to Buy Now: $80.10 $149 (46% off for YD readers with coupon code “YANKOFIIT“). Hurry, sale ends on Nov 24.

Just how spectacles and walking sticks went from being medical aids to fashion accessories, the FiiT mask aims at transcending the face-mask’s clinical nature, turning it into a fashion accessory that’s comfortable to wear – while obviously still doing a good job of filtering the air you breathe. The mask’s design can easily be separated into its two halves – its appearance, and its performance. On the visual front, the mask sports a soft, stiff design, reminiscent of soft-shell cases. Unlike the pleated, flimsy, fabric design found on disposable masks, the FiiT’s mask sits well on your face, respecting and accentuating its contours, while never suffocating you by pressing against your nose and mouth. The mask comes with a 3-part infinitely reusable design, featuring a headstrap, an outer cover (with the valve), and finally an 8-ply replaceable NANO filter sandwiched between the two, secured in place by metal studs on the sides that give the FiiT its punkish aesthetic.

FiiT lets you choose every aspect of your mask’s design, letting you mix and match different straps, accents, studs, and even allowing you to explore colors and prints on the front cover. Just as how you match an outfit, choosing a hoodie, jeans, and sneakers that go together as an ensemble, the FiiT’s design lets you build out your mask and change it whenever you want. Even though the mask comes with multiple custom parts, it weighs less than 40g (that’s less than your spectacles), and the FiiT’s technical fabrics prioritize breathability, so you aren’t constantly adjusting the mask, taking it off, or fiddling with it through the day.

8 layers of filtration to protect you from fine particles and nanoparticles, pollens, bacteria, viruses, gases, and odors.

Sitting in between the mask’s two outer parts is its replaceable NANO Filtration® fabric, an 8-ply filter that traps up to 99.91% of air pollutants, giving you crisp, clean air for anywhere between 6-12 weeks before needing to be replaced. Working on a microscopic level, the filter’s patented R-PUR technology is the first in the world to protect you from nanoparticles as small as 20 nanometres. The filter is accompanied by the FiiT’s valve system, which sits on the front cover. Equipped with a twist-to-activate system, the valve can be shut, forcing exhaled air to pass through the filter too (useful on airplanes and in smaller environments), or can simply be twisted to let you freely breathe out warm air, increasing the mask’s breathability by up to 300%. Finally, the FiiT comes with an app that measures the air quality of your surroundings, constantly calculating your filter’s efficacy with time. Depending on the air quality you’re breathing, the app can tell you when to replace filters, so you’re always breathing the freshest air possible, and you never end up throwing a clean filter before it actually needs replacing.

The FiiT comes from the folks at R-PUR, who debuted with the Nano mask back in 2016, which focused around helping cyclists and fitness enthusiasts breathe clean air (promptly selling over 60,000 masks since its launch). With the FiiT, however, R-PUR champions an approach that combines fashion with utility. The masks balance key features like comfort, reusability, and 99.91% filtration, with a wildly customizable design that lets the wearer choose what kind of mask they want to wear… because if masks are here to stay, the least we can do is look beyond that boring (and mildly triggering) blue surgical mask.

Click Here to Buy Now: $80.10 $149 (46% off for YD readers with coupon code “YANKOFIIT“). Hurry, sale ends on Nov 24.

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The James Dyson Award announces its 2021 Global Winners – Here’s a look at the winning designs

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On a mission to locate, evaluate, and celebrate great young minds and their potentially life-changing ideas, the James Dyson Award is held every year, seeing thousands of entries from budding designers and design engineers from around the world. Just this year alone, the international award program witnessed participants from 28 countries, of which a jury panel of 15 Dyson engineers selected 20 National Award Winners to proceed to the final stage of the competition.

Today, on the 17th of November, the awards program announced the winners of its 3 awards – the International Award, the Sustainability Award, and the newly introduced Medical Award. The winners were reviewed and hand-picked by Sir James Dyson himself, and will now receive £30,000 to help develop their ideas into tangible, life-impacting designs.

Click Here to view all the James Dyson Award entries for 2021.

HOPES – International Winner


HOPES (short for Home Eye Pressure E-skin Sensor) is a wearable biomedical device that allows pain-free, low-cost, at-home intraocular pressure (IOP) testing for patients suffering from glaucoma. “It turns out that IOP is the clinician’s single metric to assess glaucoma”, mentioned the designers behind HOPES, who were motivated after one of the team members’ fathers was diagnosed with glaucoma back in 2019. Regular monitoring of IOP fluctuation is critical to help determine long-term treatment goals, although at-home IOP testing still remains faulty at best, and inaccurate compared to the Goldmann applanation tonometry method, which still remains the clinical standard for testing intraocular pressure. The HOPES is a finger-glove with a high-density pressure sensor array embedded at the tip, connected to a smartwatch that sits around the wrist.

Using the device is as simple as running the HOPES app and applying pressure on the center of the eyelid with the fingertip. The wearable then lets you know when the test is complete, and accurately calculates the user’s intraocular pressure while comprehensively recording all the test results over the previous days and weeks. The device comes with a one-size-fits-all design, is pain-free, user-friendly, and costs 10x lesser than going to a physician. The design team behind HOPES is currently cooperating with clinicians at the National University Hospital in Singapore to collect patients’ eye pressure data to train their machine learning models They’re also simultaneously optimizing performance and improving on the design and form factor of the HOPES device. Watch the entire video here.

Plastic Scanner – Sustainability Winner


While the idea of being able to scan and identify a piece of plastic doesn’t sound particularly ground-breaking to the average consumer, it could be potentially ground-breaking for plastics recycling facilities, allowing them to swiftly identify and sort out different types of plastics while recycling or repurposing them. Aimed at helping reduce plastic pollution drastically (by allowing them to be efficiently recycled), the Plastic Scanner is an open-source gadget by designer Jerry de Vos of TU Delft, Netherlands. Having spent time as a core team member of Precious Plastic, Jerry quickly learned what a hassle it was to correctly identify plastics while recycling them. “Large factories in Europe are able to sort plastics based on infrared reflection”, de Vos mentioned. “It became my personal mission to make similar technology available for any recycler around the world.”

The Plastic Scanner is a nifty handheld device with an open-source design that can easily be built and modified by any plastics recycling facility, especially in low and middle-income countries. The device uses a discreet infrared spectroscope to identify plastics. It isn’t as accurate as the infrared techniques used by state-of-the-art spectroscopes, but it’s a low-cost solution that’s accurate enough at identifying most common plastics. Currently, Jerry is assembling a team of friends and colleagues to create new prototypes and to do pilot projects in both industry- and low resource settings. Ultimately the goal is to build DIY kit versions of the Plastic Scanner and build out a database of open-source documents and schematics that make it easy for others to build and contribute to the project. Watch the entire video here.

REACT – Medical Winner


A Medical Winner in the James Dyson Award, the REACT is a new system for stopping bleeding from a knife wound. The REACT system uses a rapid, inflatable Tamponade device that is inserted into the stab wound. The automated inflation of this Tamponade provides internal pressure directly to the bleeding site, controlling bleeding faster than current methods by essentially ‘plugging’ the wound opening. The most common cause of death in a knife wound is blood loss. It takes only 5 minutes to bleed to death, which isn’t enough time for even an ambulance to arrive at the location in most cities. The police are often the first trained responders at the scene, but they do not have access to the tools required to prevent blood loss. The hope is that REACT will change this reality.

The most common training advice to first responders is that if the impaled object is still within the body, to absolutely leave it be. This is because the object is applying internal pressure to the wound site whilst also filling the cavity, preventing internal bleeding. The REACT works on the same principle, effective even when someone is bleeding out. The implantable medical-grade silicon Balloon Tamponade is inserted into the wound tract by a first responder, and pressure sensors within the REACT device help determine how much to inflate the tamponade to provide the right amount of pressure to stop the bleeding. The simple application and automated inflation procedure of the REACT system makes it a game-changer for first responders. The Tamponade can be installed and can stop hemorrhaging in under a minute, saving hundreds of lives a year. It’s suitable for large cavities like the abdomen too, and it is also easy to remove, giving the patient the best chance at reconstructive surgery. Designer Joseph Bentley of Loughborough University has filed a patent on the REACT system, with hopes that it will eventually be developed into a product that saves hundreds of lives every year.

Click Here to view all the James Dyson Award entries for 2021.

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This comfortable white tee-shirt can perform an ECG much more accurately than your Apple Watch

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The world of fashion doesn’t get its fair share of credit. Clothes do so much more than just cover our bodies and indicate cultures/styles. They help regulate our inner temperature, armors help protect against harm, camo-wear helps reduce visibility, safety vests help increase visibility, sports clothing boost your physical abilities, the list goes on… and in the near future, the clothes you wear may be able to prematurely detect and prevent heart attacks.

The Viscero vest by Ireland-based Design Partners is a wearable ECG device that looks like the iconic plain white tee shirt. Designed to do away with those incredibly clunky Holter monitors (that can often increase patient discomfort), the Viscero is simply a white vest you wear underneath your clothing. Unlike the Holter which involves sticking ‘wet’ electrodes to your body and having them connected to a walkie-talkie-sized device that’s perpetually strapped to your chest, Viscero is as easy and freeing as wearing any t-shirt or garment. The body-hugging vest comes with dry electrodes integrated into the tee shirt’s design, placed at strategic points to accurately capture medical data, while the data itself is sent to a compact smart wearable device that attaches to the side of the tee, right above the pocket.

Designer: Design Partners

An arrhythmia is an abnormal heartbeat that can be harmless or life-threatening. The most common type is atrial fibrillation (AFib), where the upper heart chambers contract irregularly, increasing the likelihood of blood clots, stroke, heart failure, and other heart-related complications. According to the CDC, it’s estimated that by 2030 as many as 12.1 million people in the United States will annually have AFib.

Detecting Afib isn’t particularly swift or easy either. Unlike an ECG, which just captures data over a short window, checking for Afib requires gathering hours or even days’ worth of heart behavior to check for anomalies. The Apple Watch, which can perform basic ECGs, isn’t designed to continuously check for Afib, which means its accuracy rate falls to around 34% in most adults, according to research. Doctors commonly rely on Holter monitors for shorter monitoring windows (roughly 24 hours), or on invasive methods like implantable loop recorders (ILRs) for long-term capturing. While the Holter seems like the most convenient option, a traditional Holter is uncomfortable to wear and inhibits natural movement, often making the data it collects unrepresentative and unhelpful. This led to Design Partners asking themselves, “How might we create an accurate, unintrusive, and non-invasive solution that could monitor you for weeks or even months?”

Viscero’s biggest innovation is the fact that it contains a carefully designed ECG circuit system right into the fabric. The tee uses a series of dry electrodes that are positioned away from the chest to more peripheral locations while maintaining consistent compression points. This allows the Viscero to sit on your torso as comfortably as a tee would, while in fact, being a medical-grade, 6-lead ECG monitoring system. “Now you can run for the bus, walk your dog, hug your children and unwind on the sofa, without giving Viscero a second thought”, say the team at Design Partners.