D-Lab Health provides a multidisciplinary approach to global health technology design via guest lectures and a major project based on fieldwork. We will explore the current state of global health challenges and learn how to design medical technologies that address those problems. Students may travel to Nicaragua during spring break to work with health professionals, using medical technology design kits to gain field experience for their device challenge. As a final class deliverable, you will create a product design solution to address challenges observed in the field. The resulting designs are prototyped in the summer for continued evaluation and testing.

Innovation in global health practice requires leaders who are trained to think and act like entrepreneurs. Whether at a hospital bedside or in a remote village, global healthcare leaders must understand both the business of running a social venture as well as how to plan for and provide access to life saving medicines and essential health services. Each week, the course features a lecture and skills-based tutorial session led by industry, non-profit foundation, technology, and academic leaders to think outside the box in tackling and solving problems in innovation for global health practice through the rationale design of technology and service solutions. The lectures provide the foundation for faculty-mentored pilot project from MOH, students, or non-profit sponsors that may involve creation of a market or business plan, product development, or a research study design.

This guide uses biology, health, and world study topics to engage students in global health issues and solutions from experiential and multidisciplinary perspectives. The guide offers an outline of how to organize and host a "Global Health Conference," and provides suggestions regarding logistics and instructions as well as resource materials for preparing and organizing a student conference. The Global Health Conference is a school event where students present display boards and two-page essays on various countries and their health challenges, very much like a science fair.
As a template, the guide can be modified to suit each educator's goals, student needs, and school policies. The guide is designed to involve all students from a single grade level—e.g., all seventh-grade students. However, educators can use pieces from the guide or tailor it to one class or a whole school. We recommend that each educator adapt this guide to the most appropriate scale for his or her own school environment and policies, student needs, and learning outcomes.

The design team of BIOE 260: Introduction to Global Health Issues, created a health-science curriculum that focuses on the needs of a primary school in Terrier Rouge, Haiti. The activities are designed to be relevant to local health issues, use locally available resources, maintain cultural sensitivity, and foster participation and comprehension. The activities cover a range of lessons including water purification, the importance of hand washing, and general anatomy of the human body. The program will culminate in a showcase where the students can present what they have learned to their families. Although these activities were designed for a specific group of students, the lessons could easily be adapted for a different community. Guidance and support were provided by Dr. Rebecca Richards-Kortum, Monica Dyer, Janet Wheeler, Soizic Bonnet, Dan Erchick, Rose Thelus, Allison Lipper, and Yvette Mirabal.

Interlinked Challenges features bits of information about global challenges from the last 400,000 years. Challenges include: biodiversity, climate change, eco-migrations, economy, energy, food, health, hunger, population growth, poverty, security, sustainability, transportation, urbanization, and water.

Info bits are drawn from articles, podcasts, blogs, press releases, institutional reports, testimonies, encyclopedias, books, and documentaries. Each bit is referenced, date stamped, linked to the original article, tagged on multiple themes, and assigned a related image, which has its own description, author credit, date stamp, image permission, and back link. Connections are made to bits of info from the 2007 IPCC Report on Climate Change.

This class provides a space for medical students and MD/PhD students, as well as HASTS (History, Anthropology, Science, Technology, and Society) PhD students to discuss social and ethical issues in the biosciences and biotechnologies as they are being developed. Discussions are with course faculty and with leading figures in developing technologies such as George Daley or George Church in stem cell or genomics research, Bruce Walker or Pardis Sabeti in setting up laboratories in Africa, Paul Farmer and Partners in Health colleagues in building local support systems and first world quality care in Haiti, Peru, and Rwanda, and Amy Farber in building patient-centered therapeutic-outcome research for critical but orphan" diseases. Goals include stimulating students to think about applying their learning in Boston to countries around the world, including using the experiences they have had in their home countries or research experience abroad. Goals also include a mix of patient-doctor care perspectives from medical anthropology, and moving upstream in the research chain to questions of how to move discoveries from basic research through the pipelines into clinical and bedside care. "

Bioengineering design students developed a medicine dosing device, a pump that can fit on most medication bottles and can be set to deliver a specific amount of medication.

A Beyond Traditional Borders design team created a Microenterprise Training Course to teach high school students in Lesotho the basic business and management skills to establish and maintain a school cooperative.