Preemptive Strike on Emerging Epidemics
Posted on March 3rd, 2020 by Mary Lord
A Defense Department study recruits engineers and scientists in an effort to study animal-to-human disease transmission and prevent emerging epidemics.
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Tags: animal to human diseases, ASEE Prism magazine, Biomedical Engineering, DARPA preventing Emerging Pathogenic Threats PREEMPT project, ebola, public health, vector, Zika
A classic engineering challenge involves designing and building devices that can deliver necessary goods to “Toxic Island,” an island that has been quarantined by the World Health Organization due to a nasty outbreak of disease. Working within specific constraints, including limited materials, middle school students follow the engineering design process to design, test, and improve a device that can deliver “medicine” and other vital supplies accurately and quickly without touching either the water or island.
Health clinics in the developing world often are noisy places, making it doubly difficult for medics to hear whether a child has pneumonia or other potentially fatal respiratory illness. So engineers and doctors at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Md., teamed up to reinvent the stethoscope using audio technology and artificial intelligence.
