As smartphones and similar devices have become ubiquitous in our society, they present a unique and unforeseen opportunity for scientific inquiry. These devices are, in essence, handheld computers that have several sensors (cameras, microphones, touch) and sources (LED flash, speakers, haptics) attached to them. While these sensors have been optimized to perform other functions, many also represent the base components for medical devices. This has led to an explosion of research efforts in the ”Low-Resource Settings” arena, which aims to bring scientific, investigational and medical devices to all corners of the globe and hence have the greatest societal impact by putting technology within the reach of everyone. The challenge however is to determine whether these devices are ”good enough” to make a positive impact or whether its over simplification can result in adverse events.
Students across many disciples are welcome in this course as the multidisciplinary, active learning methodology invites contributions from broad perspectives from problem definition and hypothesis development (Medicine and Biology), device design, implementation, and interpretation (Engineering and basic sciences), as well as ethics and societal impact (humanities).