Open Source Biomedical Engineering for Sustainability in African Healthcare: Combining Academic Excellence with Innovation

Accessible quality healthcare is one of the biggest problems in Africa and other developing countries. This is not only due to the unavailability of resources, but also to the absence of a structured formative process for the design and management of healthcare facilities. Biomedical engineers are known to be the link between technology and medical practice, which is a pillar of healthcare systems in developed countries. In this paper, the Open Source for BioMedical Engineering (OS4BME) project and its kick off summer school are presented. The OS4BME project aims to develop a new generation of biomedical engineers, able to exploit emerging technologies generated by the recent “Makers” revolution. During the one week summer school, students from various sub-Saharan countries have been introduced to these new design, development and sharing paradigms. Students worked together identifying new possible simple biomedical devices, which could help in daily clinical practice. A cheap and easy-to-use neonatal monitoring device was chosen as a Crowd design project. The OS4BME Baby Monitor was designed and assembled by the students during the one week summer school, demonstrating the creative potential of the new generation of biomedical engineers empowered with the paradigms of crowdsourcing and rapid prototyping. Keywords-Biomedical Engineering; Open Source; Open Hardware; Crowdsourcing; Africa.