August 2, 2019 • 44 mins
How are people using bicycles to create new machines for developing countries? What are MediKits? Why is e-waste recycling such a dangerous job? Join Jonathan and Chris as they look at the ways in which innovators across the world repurpose old tech.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to tech Stuff, a production of I Heart Radios,
How Stuff Works. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff.
I'm your host job in Strickland. I'm an executive producer
with How Stuff Works and I heart Radio and I
love all things tech. And In this classic episode of
tech Stuff, which originally published on August twenty second, two twelve,
(00:27):
Chris Palette and I talk about repurposing technology for developing countries,
taking technology that might be considered outdated here in the
United States and in other parts of the world, and
then making sure that that technology, with the proper support,
goes to places where it can do an enormous amount
of good. I find this particular topic pretty inspirational when
(00:49):
it is done properly. Obviously, you can do this in
a way that can cause no good at all, or
maybe even cause harm if done irresponsibly. But we'll get
into all of that. So let's sit back, relax and
enjoy this classic episode. We're gonna talk about something that's
really kind of a a humanitarian sort of approach to hacking.
(01:12):
But before we really get into it, I wanted to
read something. It's a little listener mail. This is actual
listener mail. I have it in front of me. It's
on real paper and everything. What kind of strange technology
is that I know? Not? It confuses and frightens me.
It's like it's appearing on a screen, but it's on
(01:33):
an actual physical sheet of paper. Who's it is? But
only because there's a lamp behind the letter that I'm reading.
This is a letter that we received from our super fan,
Adam Pervez, who actually has sent stuff to lots of
our podcast He's a big fan of How Stuff Works
podcasts in general. And if you guys have been to
our Facebook page, you may have seen a picture Chris
(01:56):
and I were sporting a pair of alpaca wool hats,
and these are hats that he picked up while he
was doing something he calls the happiness plunge. Packers are keen. Yeah,
so the happiness plunges. This idea he had where he
decided he wanted to really follow his dreams and try
to make the world a better place than it was
(02:16):
when he got there. And so the idea is that
he quit his job and he started traveling through the
world really but mostly through Latin America when he started,
and trying to help different communities as he traveled from
place to place, he would listen to the house Stuff
Works podcasts in between those places. Well, I wanted to
read a paragraph from this letter. It's actually a fairly
(02:39):
long letter, so I'm not gonna read the whole thing,
but here's the paragraph. My goal is a travelers to
leave each place better than how I found it, which
I do by volunteering everywhere I go. I've had volunteering
experiences such as feeding the elderly at a nursing home
in Mexico, installing solar panels in rural Honduras, attracting book
donations for a rural library project in Peru, playing with
kids at orphanages in Costa Rica and Ecuador, designing a
(03:00):
financing strategy for a new NGO and El Salvador, and
marketing an organization that turns donated used bikes into bike machines,
washing machines, blenders, water well pumps, etcetera in Guatemala. There's
a lot I can offer as an engineer slash NBA
and there's more to the letter than that, but that's
kind of what gave us the idea for this podcast.
We wanted to talk about technology that people have taken
(03:24):
and repurposed to benefit people who are in developing nations
who don't have access to the same level of technology
we do. And in fact, if we were to give
those people the technology that we take for granted every day,
it would not necessarily be helpful because their conditions, their
day to day conditions are so vastly different from the
(03:44):
ones we are used to that they would not necessarily
be able to take advantage of that tech. So they're
actually taking kind of a lower tech approach by repurposing
stuff that was never meant to do the things that
it now does. And we thought, what a cool idea,
So we want to kind of get into that and
sort of talk about the different ways people have tried
(04:05):
to to uh accomplish this and uh, I'm sorry you're
gonna say something, well, I was gonna say that. Uh
and in some of these places, uh, you know, these
are the places where, for example, cell phones have really
vaulted over land lines because a lot of a lot
of areas have not ever been wired for landline telephone used. So, um,
(04:26):
you know now that uh cell phone talk technology is
so inexpensive, I mean just the basic phone technology. Um,
and you know, many people in places such as uh,
you know Africa for example. UM, more of the rural areas. UM.
You know, really it's a an urban versus rural thing anyway.
But but um, yeah, a lot of more the rural
(04:47):
places where or places that are more removed where there's
a lot of distance in between that area and an
urban area. UM. Uh cell phone usage. You know, it's
easier to put up the towers than it is to
wire those places for landlines. So um you know that
In doing research for other podcasts where we've talked about phones. UM,
(05:08):
I've just run across stories what they've said, Well, you know,
cell phone usage per capita maybe higher in some of
these other places, simply because everybody's got a cell phone.
They never had a landline phone. Right, it's now that
they dropped one for the other. It's that they completely
leap frogged. Yeah, and and and and the play and
some of these inventions that we're going to talk about
um or these technologies. Uh, they may not necessarily have
(05:31):
uh for example, electricity seven, but they might be able
to repurpose some of these other things uh inexpensively to
improve their lives through this other technology. And it is
a lot of it is very inventive. I actually saw
Apollo thirteen invoked in one of the articles that I
was searching for because, um, if you know the story
(05:54):
that was the mission where um, they the astronauts had serious,
serious problem because they're some of the technology failed, um
and they had to come up with other stuff on
the fly. I know that was actually the uh, the
genesis of the idea for the TV show Scrap Peep Challenge,
which in the United States was Junkyard Wars, where you
(06:15):
had to just throw some other stuff together and had
sort of this the same idea you would you would
you would go through a junkyard and you would salvage
different machines in order to build something that was specifically
intended to achieve a a particular goal which was established
at the beginning of the show. So you would have
a goal like it might be traversed this this landscape here,
(06:37):
and you're going to have to be able to go up,
you know, a twenty degree incline, and there's going to
be a section that's gonna be rocky, and there might
even be a section where you have to travel across water.
So you have to build a machine that's capable capable
of doing all those things, but all you have is
whatever is in this junkyard. Yeah, and of course they
did up mids TV, so they'd end up seeding the
junkyard a handful of necessary parts. But is if nobody ever,
(07:01):
you know, they don't know everything that's in the junkyard,
I'm sure they go, well, it turns out that there
isn't any of this stuff and we're kind of stuck.
So it would make it would not make for interesting television,
so they would they would put in things in there.
But here's the thing is that people are really inventive, right,
and they can come up with solutions that you do
not anticipate. So even if you were to seed a
(07:21):
junkyard with things that you think, oh, well, clearly, they'll
want to build a device that can do this by
using this, this, and this, it may turn out that
they end up getting stuff that you did not see
that junkyard with and they build something that works, you know,
as well or perhaps even better than what you had
conceived of when you were seating it. Because people adapt
(07:42):
to the situation they are in, and they are very
quick to adapt their technology as well. And in fact,
we have seen that in developing nations, and a lot
of the projects we're gonna be talking about kind of
they didn't start this process. They just saw something that
was happening and decided to help it along. Uh. And
there are a couple of organizations I want to mention
(08:02):
before we even get into specifics. One of those is
called Random Hacks of Kindness and another is called Geeks
Without Bounds, And both of these organizations are dedicated to
helping developing nations through various hack projects. Although and both
of those cases, they are more focused on the software
(08:23):
side of things. So, like you were saying, you know,
cell phone use being much more prevalent than landline use.
A lot of these involve apps for phones that would
alert people to things that affect them in their daily lives. Um,
and things that other people just wouldn't think of because
it's not something that affects us, right, So a lot
(08:44):
of these are programs that would not that that are
again on that software side, that are not about hardware hacks.
We're really focusing mostly on hardware hacks today, although some
other stuff might pop up to yeah, this is um.
Also keep in mind that a lot of the technology
that that can be used for ther you know, it's
perfectly good technology. Um, you know, we're not talking necessarily
(09:07):
about junk. Although it might be things that other people
have cast off as being obsolete. In some cases it's
you know, completely functional and uh you know, there's there's
no reason to overdo it. Yeah, there's some cases where
it's not even repurposing in the sense of making something
do something it wasn't meant to do, like repurposing, just
(09:28):
as in reusing. So there are a lot of these
programs that allow you to do things like donate your
old electronics to various programs, so like old computers are.
That's the perfect example. It might be a computer that
you think is obsolete because it can't run the latest
stuff that you like to run, but for a developing nation,
it might be a very useful asset. But we're really
(09:50):
looking at in this podcast technology that's been turned into
doing something else. And I was going to start with
Maya Pedal and Maya All I'm I'm assuming that's the
organization that Adam was talking about in his letter, because
Maya Pedal is the is a Guatemalan organization that takes
(10:12):
donated bikes, mainly donated from the United States and from Canada,
and they take those bikes to either recondition them and
sell them or they use the parts to build what
they call and I'm going to completely butcher the pronunciation
of this biking mackinas or bike powered machines pedal powered machines.
And so what they're doing is they're actually taking these
(10:34):
bikes apart to some extent, and using that pedal power.
So instead of it turning a wheel, it's turning some
other mechanical part to accomplish a task that they might
otherwise not have a mechanical opportunity to to address it,
like things like and then simple stuff you know, Adam
(10:54):
and mentioned things like a washing machine. Well that's a
that's a perfect example. You've got a big tub that
you put the water in, the soap in, the clothing in,
and you have an agitator in there, something that turns
around and moves the clothing so that it creates this
agitation which will help the soap and water work out
all the soil and everything else that's in the clothing.
(11:18):
You have that agitator hooked up through a series of
of gears and chains or belts to a pedal system
on a bike, and it might even have the back
half of the bike more or less intact, where you've
got the seat and everything, and you sit down the seat,
you pedal the petals, it turns the agitator and it
ends up washing clothing that way. There's actually a guy
(11:41):
in Texas who had um a blog. The last entry
I saw was in two but there was a guy
in Texas named John Wells who was building. He built
something very similar to that called the He called it
the bike O Worsher Worsher spelled w O R s
h e R and through Texas Fashion UH. It was
(12:01):
part of the Southwest Texas Alternative Energy and Sustainable Living
Field Laboratory. So the idea was that he was building
stuff that would allow you to have a sustainable life
where you're not depending so much on things like electricity.
And it was a really cool project. But it's very
similar to the stuff you see in these developing nations now.
(12:22):
In the case of Texas, obviously it's not due to
lack of electricity. It's more of kind of a an
UH environmentally friendly lifestyle that he wants to adopt, right
But in the case of Guatemala, it may be necessity
because not all places in rural rural areas of these
(12:42):
these countries have access to regular electricity. Yeah, yeah, that's true.
And one of the things that struck me and doing
research for this podcast is the similarity of some of
these inventions to things that you might see in the
pages of Make magazine or among the er community, um
you know, talking about different bike machines. For example, I
(13:04):
remember watching a video probably more than a year ago
now where uh, some some folks in San Francisco basically
collect old bikes and what they do is they cut
them apart and make new bikes out of them. I
mean they're they're strange contraptions, things with different size wheels
and all sorts of others. Mostly too. It's like an
art bike's community, and it's mostly because they can and
(13:26):
and want to have fun doing that. But you can,
you can do the same kinds of things to to
uh uh, to create sustainable UM machinery. Yeah. I saw
a great video from the Maya Pedal Group where they
showed a de grainer and it was what it was
was it was this it looked like the back half
(13:47):
of a bicycle. But then there was this shoot that
you could feed uh corn through corn that's actually still
on the cob, uncooked corn, and you would feed it
through and had a series of gears that would end
up pulling the kernels off the cob so that you
could de grain that corn very very efficiently. You just
(14:09):
turn the you know, you're peddling, that's what's turning the
gears and uh. It was so much faster than doing
it by hand, and it actually saves a lot of
time and effort. So that was another example. But they
had lots of other ones that I saw. One that
was a a pedal powered blender, and they were showing
how they were using aloe plants. They would take the
(14:31):
skin off the allow plant and chop it up, put
it in with some water and a blender, uh, and
then uh start peddling. And they would use this to
create things like shampoos that they could then sell, and
it was a way of generating money because these are
in general, the communities that these these projects are benefiting
are incredibly poor compared to the lives that most of
(14:58):
the people in the west, uh, like the developed nations
are used to. So for example, for for me and Chris,
you know, the thought of Uh, the reason why these
devices are so important is because they they take away
the reliance upon things like kerosene, which might cost four
dollars a week, and that is prohibitively expensive. I mean
(15:20):
that is that's a totally different world than the world
we live in. Yeah. Basically, if you're listening to this podcast,
you know this, this is kind of a different different experience. Yeah.
So yeah, the and and there was a lot of
other examples of the same sort of thing, mostly, you know,
all these really cool versions of bikes, uh, to do
things like make tiles. There was a bicycle bicycle powered
(15:43):
thresher for for harvesting crops. There there were water pumps.
I saw one where a guy was riding a bike
and water was coming out of a of a pipe
and it was it was like a bicycle powered well yeah, um.
I actually ran across an invention from the Nippon Basic
(16:03):
company in Japan called the cyclo Clean and basically it's
it's designed to you add it to the bike. It's
kind of hard to describe, you might want to look
it up, but it's it's got water containers so somebody
would ride there by and it goes on your bike. Uh,
an existing bike, so it's not unmodified if you will,
you don't want to cut a bike apart or anything
(16:25):
like that as a moving bike. And uh so you
ride to a place a source of water. Now, if
you think about lakes or streams, creeks, uh, you know,
most of us listening to this podcast probably know all
sorts of micro organisms live in that water. A lot
of it isn't safe to drink, and a lot of
people around the world don't have access to clean water. Um.
(16:47):
So what this does is you pour the water into
the containers and as you uh you know, using the
kinetic energy of pedaling the bike, the Cyclo clean will
filter the water. So it actually creates potable water by
the energy of the bike, and it's it's portable and potable.
(17:08):
So it's that that's a pretty nifty um, I guess,
just potent pot but um, actually, I just want to
point out before we move on real quick. UM, A
lot of the devices that I found, uh in researching
this episode are not things we can talk about because
they're they're invented, they're intended to be inexpensive, and they're new,
(17:33):
so it's not really repurposing technology. There are so many
really cool devices, it might it might also be worth
investigating it again in the future. Some of the really
cool devices that are you know, they'll be like a
twenty dollar or something and it completely does a very
useful function and speeds life. And I'm like, oh, man,
if I could just use like we you know, Dean
(17:54):
came in the whole thing about you know, his his
water projects, which I think we talked about in the
Cayman podcast, but that was years ago anyway, So I
wanted to also mention, Yeah, Maya Pedal if you if
you live in the United States or Canada and you're
interested in donating an old bicycle to this. Maya Pedal
(18:14):
does have its own website and you can learn more
about the program and how you can participate. They also
invite people to come down and visit their facilities in Guatemala. Obviously,
you can even work there for a while, volunteer there
for a while, and help do things like make repairs
or design new machines. Um. It's very much a hacker
(18:35):
culture in the sense of they have they have specific
tasks they need to achieve, they have a specific set
of resources, they they they are at their disposal and
they have to find the way to make the resources
meet their their needs. So they're not interested in making
it look pretty. They're not interested in any of that.
Their aesthetics are not important. Yeah, it's all about achieving
(18:59):
the goal. And and that's something that appeals to a
lot of hackers who are all about, hey, yeah, I
know that this was meant to do this one thing,
but you know, if we just changed it a little bit,
we could totally do this other thing. Let's see if
we can make it happen. And uh, you read a
lot about that kind of stuff in these in these stories. Um,
(19:19):
there was another one that I wanted to mention, very
similar kind of idea again using bicycles. A fellow named
how Watts invented something designed to help countries that are
all about dealing with e waste. So, you know, old electronics,
if you're right, yeah, if you've ever if you've ever
(19:40):
tried to get rid of your electronics, maybe maybe you've
tried to put them in some sort of e waste
recycle program. One of the problems of of some of
those programs, not all of them, they're not all created equal,
but some of those programs, yes, some of these programs
ship that stuff off to various developing nations where they
(20:01):
have an industry all around recycling that material. And it's
mostly about recapturing the metals that are used in those products,
mainly copper, yeah, and lead to that's another one of
the big ones, recapturing the copper and lead that's used
in these electronics. It can be a very dangerous thing
(20:22):
to do if you aren't being if you're if you're
not following particular steps right and and it can release
a lot of toxic elements into the environment and also
affect people's health. Yeah. The thing is too that in
in some of these cases, the people who are disassembling
the electronics aren't given the proper tools to do that,
and some I've read about people who had to put
(20:44):
materials into a fire essentially intending to melt it all down,
and of course in doing so, it releases toxic chemical
toxic chemicals, uh, into this the soil um people in
the atmosphere. The people in the immediate area have health
problems as a result of the metals leaching into their soil.
(21:05):
It can it can affect areas even further out from
the immediate area. It's it's one of those. In a way,
it really shows that environmental concerns and ecology go beyond
just the point. Like there's a there's like a ring effect,
right you you move one ring further out from the center,
and you can still see where the effects are and
(21:27):
they might not be a severe and they may not
be the same effects as you would see right at
the point of contact, but it's still negative. Well, in
this case, very it's exactly what you're talking about. You know,
a lot of these UH countries, what they do is
that they will use fire to melt stuff down. Like
like let's say copper wire that's insulated, So you've got
(21:48):
a rubber insulation around copper wire. Well, they want to
get to the copper. They want to get the rubber
off of there. And what's an efficient way of doing that. Well,
you could burn the rubber off, but that can release
a lot of toxic chemicals into the atmost sphere and
get it into the ground as well. UH. And then
you also have essentially you have burnt copper, which is
not as valuable as copper that has not been put
(22:09):
through this process. Chris and I will be back to
talk a little bit more about this repurposing technology for
developing countries idea of First, let's take a quick break.
So what Watts did was he built a machine that
(22:31):
was again a bicycle powered machine where he called it
the E Source and it has a grinder in it
and it has also a metal separator. Uh it's it's
it's like a centrifuge in a way. And what you
do is you put the copper wire into the grinder
and you pedal the petals. Some grinders actually grind that
(22:55):
up so that the rubber and the and the copper
come apart. It shreds the copper y air, so you
get smaller segments of copper wire and the rubbers is
pulled right off of the copper. The spinning plate actually
spends so that it separates out the copper from the rubbers.
So then you've got these rubber pellets on one side
(23:17):
and you've got the copper on the other side. And
it means that you no longer have the danger of
burning this stuff and releasing the toxic chemicals, and you
can actually recycle the rubber as well. So it it
also adds a second level of revenue to this process,
which before was all about the metal because you know,
you couldn't use the rubber after you've burnt it off.
(23:38):
But now you've got this these rubber pellets that you
can actually use in other forms of recycling. So it
adds benefit to the process and it takes away some
of the more dangerous parts of recycling electronics. So that
was his invention. There's actually video on the web. He's
(23:59):
got a website about the source. So if you and
it's E S O U R C E. If you
do a search for that, you can actually find his
website and learn more about it and the project that
he's been working on. It's really really interesting. So that's
another example of again using bicycles. There are a lot
of those, because bicycles are one of those that's a
(24:19):
piece of technology that's common around the world. And uh
and and it's one of those that um it's it's
so much more accessible than other kinds of technology, and
so it's not dependent upon electricity or fuel it's got
uh it's it's really attractive for these communities that might
not otherwise be able to afford the sort of technology
(24:41):
that can do whatever it is these machines do. Yeah.
In in a similar vein. You actually wrote about one
of the technologies I wanted to talk about. UM and uh,
you know, one of the serious problems that they have
in some developing nations or a lot of developing nations,
I should say, is uh uh you know babies who
(25:01):
are are born prematurely um and uh you know, uh,
they need infubation to to keep them warm. And uh,
I think it's really clever. There's Jonathan wrote an article
for the website how Stuff Works dot com on on
using engines to serve as incubators. Um. It's really really
(25:23):
cool stuff. Basically, uh, you know they uh it uses
a an engine to to generate the heat, but um,
it also has a battery powered back up. And it
was actually developed by the Center for Integration of Medicine
and Innovative Technology or SIMMIT, and a a company called
(25:45):
Design That Matters UM, which uh you know is into
all kinds of different design really. Um, they had a
basically they had a contest to see who could who
could come up with the best uh contraption for this
and it you know uses um basically different parts of
the automotive assembly for you know, um uh there's a
(26:09):
handrail built into it. For example, and there you know,
they're parts that that come that are not part of it,
the automotive kit, but the rest of it. You know,
they use the headlights to generate heat and HV a
C form you know, to stir the heat around. Yeah,
(26:31):
it's it's that was definitely an interesting project to read
about because again it was uh it was this idea
that it's not just the problem of um of getting
the tech to them, it's getting tech that is easy
to maintain. And it's a lot easier to maintain the
basic parts of an automobile. Again, and technology that has
(26:53):
fairly wide distribution than it is for something that's incredibly specialized.
So if a hospital sent uh A a high tech
incubator to a developing nation and that incubator were to
break down, as you know technology tends to do over time,
it's a lot harder for that. It may be impossible
(27:14):
for that that organization to make repairs. It may take
months to get a broken machine fixed when it's got
that level of sophistication, and the tools that the people
have don't meet that level of sophistication. So being able
to create technology that can accomplish the same goal, but
(27:35):
but is built from much more basic types of tech
that have a lot more distribution around the world. Means
that you have made it far more accessible. Because again,
in fact I read this, and this was from Make magazine,
there was a great article by Paul spin Rad called
design for hack in Medicine, and in that there was
(27:56):
a little fact that said about medical technology that reaches
poor country is hand me down equipment designed for first
world facilities. That's the problem because these are not first
world facilities that these these devices are going to, so
there's limited use there. Um. You don't you don't go
in and plug something into the wall in some of
these cases. You don't have a wall to plug into
(28:18):
in some of these cases, so you have to come
up with a new way of powering that. And I
think I misspoke a few minutes ago when I was
talking about using the car engines. They don't, you know,
put the kid on the engine. That would not be
very good. Um. Now they used the engines for parts. Um,
And that's because the the you know, people have the
(28:38):
tech around and generally people know how to repair a car,
so they know what the different pieces do, and uh,
you know, the parts would be available and then, uh,
I want to talk a little bit about a fellow
named Jose Gomez Marquez. Now he's really looked into this
medical issue about creating medical equipment for countries that do
(29:02):
not have first world medical facilities, and uh, there's a
whole list of different kinds of technology that he and
his team have come up with, uh to help out
these countries. One of those was a device that actually
uses sunlight to sterilize surgical tools, which again that's that's
(29:23):
phenomenal and according to the articles is it uses a bucket,
a pressure cooker, and one forty pocket sized mirrors, which
all of which were purchased out of a Nicaraguan market,
and then they built out this device that uses sun
sunlight to end up heating these surgical tools so they
(29:45):
are sterilized because they don't have electricity or at least
not enough electricity to power a regular autoclave for sterilizing tools,
and that if they were to go with one that
ran on fuel, it would cost them so much money.
And again we're talking small amounts of money for most
of us, but for these communities it's it's prohibitively expensive
(30:05):
to run those sort of devices, which means that you
are risking some major medical catastrophes if you do not
have properly sterilized surgical tools. You know, you're talking about
possibility for terrible infections that could really make patient mortality
rates skyrocket. So this was a way of creating a
device that doesn't depend on electricity. It just uses sunlight,
(30:28):
which you know too, it's much easier to to to
get hold of than it would for something like electricity.
So that was a good example. But then the article
actually goes into other things that were developed specifically for
this UH, for this community and communities like it through
(30:51):
m I T. Which was this idea of medi kits.
Have you read about these UM I did? Yeah. Gmess
Marquez is UH program director for m I T s
Innovations and International Health Program. And then the idea behind
these kits and this program is that um these these
parts and pieces are available two UH physicians and who
(31:15):
are working in these areas, they might be able to
find that, and so the point was to teach them
how to use everyday stuff to make equipment that they
would have. You know, they would be familiar with his
physicians in the first world, they would already be familiar
with that the pre made, manufactured version of this. Now
(31:37):
that he's his group wants to teach people how to
take uh these parts and do it themselves on on
the fly, right from what's on hand. And in fact,
uh they they have these med kits that come in
in five different variations. So there's drug delivery, lateral flow diagnostics,
lab on a chip, vital signs, agricultural prosthetics, which the
(32:03):
agricultural prosthetics one is pretty pretty wild to me, but
we'll we'll, I'll talk about that in a second. Anyway,
it's talking about taking a lot of like Chris was saying,
a lot of basic elements that you can find in
other forms of machinery and electronics, So talking about things
like um plungers or bicycle pumps or compressors, tilt sensors,
(32:25):
that sort of stuff, these basic elements, and then teaching
people different ways of putting those things together to accomplish
whatever your goals are. And in fact, they talked a
lot about how they learned about using toys parts from
toys as medical equipment, so things like a remote controlled
(32:46):
helicopter and removing some of the machinery from that in
order to create a medical device I talked about even
there was an electric mechanical ferris wheel toy that could
be double as a centrifew just with some modification. Chris
and I have a little bit more to talk about
on this particular topic, but before we get to that,
(33:07):
let's take another quick break. The comparable medical equipment if
this country were to try and buy, it would be
really expensive, like we're talking about really sophisticated medical equipment,
but that you could accomplish the same outcome with these
(33:27):
low tech approaches just by repurposing the technology and suddenly
the cost drops dramatically. So suddenly these these things that
were out of reach for these medical facilities become attainable.
It just means that you have to learn how to
adapt this technology so that they can do what you
needed to do. And the article was so fascinating to
(33:48):
me because it talks so much about how they found
They discovered that there were people in the field already
doing this right. It had there are people who were
taking aquipment and saying all right, well, I'm just gonna
take this one piece of equipment I have, and I'm
going to alter it in this way so it can
do what I did needed to do better than it
(34:10):
can right now, because the the use cases might be
very specific and the equipment might be very generalized. And
so you might have a generalized piece of equipment that
can do a lot of stuff, but it can't do
it as well as a modified piece of equipment could.
And they were starting to see how people were modifying
things and improvising out in the field in order to
(34:32):
make repairs or to make modifications to get better results.
Uh is really really interesting and UH also really speaks
a lot to human ingenuity. Yeah. Well, I think I
think for somebody who would be trained, um, in a
modern hospital to do medical care, you would be thinking
(34:54):
of the technology that that we have available to us.
And I think that the trick is to get people
to see the similarities between everyday stuff and the high
tech equivalent. Um. You know the photo I I saw
in the article I read about about this program. Uh,
they show him using a a drinking straw for a pipette. Now,
(35:18):
you know, I would think, uh, myself, and I'm not
a medical professional by any stretch of the imagination, but
you know, having elementary chemistry classes in high school, thinking,
you know, well that that's kind of you know, that's
that's not as scientific and it's not as sanitary. But uh,
you know, if if if you do things carefully and
you know what you're doing, you can still do a
(35:41):
lot with that technology available. And that's I think that's
the point is to draw that parallels that you see. Yes,
I mean you are achieving the same goal with this
everyday technology that you would be with this highly precise
manufactured stuff, and you can do it with what you
have and it will will help people. Um. It is
(36:01):
worth pointing out that a lot of there are are
initiatives and non governmental organizations that are repurposing uh less
modern technology, you know, stuff that's five years out of date,
ten years out of date, so there's still perfectly viable
and and sending it to to other countries that don't
have access to those technologies, which is which is you
(36:23):
know great, rather than scrapping it. Um, you know, somebody
else is able to put it to use, but not
everyone can use that. So these these initiatives are certainly
very valuable. Yeah, And getting back to the medicate stuff,
what the the team discovered was that when they started
to distribute these medicates, Uh, let me read a quote
from the articles as we designed the limits of our
early kids carefully, but when users began to snap on,
(36:46):
extend and test their creations, something emerged that we did
not anticipate. They hacked our kids, which is what we
were talking about, Like they made the kids modular, like
these ideas of these modular kits, so that you could
create different as all as like the medical version of
Ardwin Knows Stuff. It was a very modular approach to
(37:06):
creating medical equipment. But they were going beyond the modular
approach and adding in elements that were not part of
the kit, or physically altering parts of the kit in
order to do what they needed it to do. And
they started to see that, okay, well, with this sort
of mentality, which makes perfect sense. You know that they
are trying to to meet the needs of whatever their
(37:29):
community happens to be. They said, all right, we have
to think to design these kits with hacking in mind,
knowing that the stuff is going to get hacked when
we send it out. We have to design the kits.
And they said, while it's impossible to predict every type
of device a kit can produce, you can start with
a core set of devices start to add degrees of
(37:50):
freedom to that core and then try to anticipate in
design areas in which those degrees will be hacked. And
the reason why they want to make sure that they
take this into account is one so that the devices
are as accessible and useful as possible, but too, and
possibly more importantly, they want to put safety measures in
place so that if you were to hack this medikit,
(38:14):
you would not end up creating a device that could
cause more harm than good. So that was their other
concern was that, all right, well, we want to make
sure that whatever we design, it's not going to end
up killing people when a hack goes wrong, because not
every time hackers know this, Not every attempt is a success.
Sometimes you take stuff apart and it just don't work
(38:36):
no more. Uh, some of us. That's the only kind
of hacker we are. I'm guilty of that. I can
take things apart really well, putting it back together and
making it work. Okay, it's a baby step process, people.
So anyway, where did these extra pieces come from? I
don't even know what this fits in. UM. I wanted
(38:59):
to talk a little bit about the Agricultural Prosthetic medic Kit,
a flavor of med kits they had because that was
one that I thought was kind of interesting. So the
kit essentially has a universal gripper. So this is a
device for people who have lost a limb and need
needs something in order to be able to uh to
(39:19):
to harvest crops. So it might be something so that
you could pick fruit from a tree. But let's say
you've lost a limb through some terrible injury or illness,
and in some cases that would lead people not to
to want to hire you anymore because there because you're
no longer as effective. So this is a This kit
(39:41):
came with a universal gripper made from PVC bicycle inner
tubes and a soda bottle to attach most farm tools
onto the arm or forearm of an amputee farmer. So
the soda bottle was the part that fit over the
whatever part of the arm remains right, so that would
fit on that, and then the rest would extend from
(40:03):
the soda bottle out ending in the universe in the
universal grippers that it could pull or grip onto whatever
it is you needed and uh and said. Each part
of the kit follows the same three principles. Core device
modifier device and consumables, um. And then it talked about
how and in various articles talked about how people who
received these kits even then would modify them further by
(40:26):
adding in other elements like other stuff to extend the
arm even further than it was already meant to go,
so that it could help people reach crops that otherwise
would be out of their range. So again, people took
the stuff that were that was distributed and made even
more modifications so that it was more useful for their
own daily lives. Uh, fascinating stuff. And and again I
(40:51):
mean the the ingenuity here, like people noticing that a
noisemaker in a toy could be used as an alarm
system for a medical device, so that when something is
getting to a critical parameter, it goes noises made so
that it alerts people. Things like that, like where they
don't have that specialized equipment, they're building it themselves. It's
(41:12):
really interesting to me. Yeah, well that's that's what tech
stuff is about. UM. You know, if you're long term listener,
you know that Jonathan and I like to talk about
technology and people, how it how it affects people, And UM,
I think this is this is really awesome because a
lot of these devices that people are taking apart are
are either obsolete or are broken, and they're repurposing them
(41:34):
and helping other people with that, and I just I
just think that's absolutely fantastic. Yeah, it's it's not just ingenuity,
but compassion and those two, those two elements coming together.
That's that's like the best of humanity, right. If you're
talking about caring for other people and using your your
creative endeavors to come up with new solutions, that's a
great story. And uh, and so guys, if you have
(41:57):
interest in this, I highly recommend you look into some
of these projects further and see maybe there's something you
can help out with. Maybe there's something you can either
donate money to, or even better, if you are able
to donate your time or expertise to some of these projects,
you can make an enormous difference in the lives of
other people and and bring a help bring a better
(42:18):
living experience to people who really are having a totally
different kind of life than the one most of us
are used to. Yeah. I mean, even if it's it's
just a small thing to you, it may make a
real difference in someone else's life. That's true. So I'm
glad that we had this discussion. I think that that's
a good overview of the subject. Now there are a
lot more examples that are out there. We really just
(42:41):
covered some some pretty broad topics. But I do recommend
you look into it if this is something that interests
you and uh and maybe you'll find your passion like
Adam did. Who you know, he he really uprooted his
entire life in order to pursue this, and that's that's amazing.
Happiness Plunge. Indeed, in fact, that Happiness Plunge dot com folks,
if you want to take a look at his website
(43:02):
because it's it's a crazy, wonderful sort of thing to do. Um,
I'm not sure that I am the kind of person
who could who could make that commitment. I am amazed
at people who do, and thankful for them as well.
And that wraps up this classic episode of tech Stuff.
If you guys have any suggestions for future episodes, why
(43:24):
not get in touch with me let me know. You
can send me an email the addresses tech Stuff at
how stuff works dot com or pop on over to
our website that's tech Stuff podcast dot com. You will
find an archive of all of our past shows. You'll
find links to our presence on social media, and you
will also find a link to our online store, where
every purchase you make goes to help this show and
(43:45):
we greatly appreciate it, and I will talk to you
again really soon. Tex Stuff is a production of I
Heart Radio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts from my
heart Radio, visit i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or
wherever you listen to your favorite shows. H
Welcome to tech Stuff, a production of I Heart Radios,
How Stuff Works. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff.
I'm your host job in Strickland. I'm an executive producer
with How Stuff Works and I heart Radio and I
love all things tech. And In this classic episode of
tech Stuff, which originally published on August twenty second, two twelve,
(00:27):
Chris Palette and I talk about repurposing technology for developing countries,
taking technology that might be considered outdated here in the
United States and in other parts of the world, and
then making sure that that technology, with the proper support,
goes to places where it can do an enormous amount
of good. I find this particular topic pretty inspirational when
(00:49):
it is done properly. Obviously, you can do this in
a way that can cause no good at all, or
maybe even cause harm if done irresponsibly. But we'll get
into all of that. So let's sit back, relax and
enjoy this classic episode. We're gonna talk about something that's
really kind of a a humanitarian sort of approach to hacking.
(01:12):
But before we really get into it, I wanted to
read something. It's a little listener mail. This is actual
listener mail. I have it in front of me. It's
on real paper and everything. What kind of strange technology
is that I know? Not? It confuses and frightens me.
It's like it's appearing on a screen, but it's on
(01:33):
an actual physical sheet of paper. Who's it is? But
only because there's a lamp behind the letter that I'm reading.
This is a letter that we received from our super fan,
Adam Pervez, who actually has sent stuff to lots of
our podcast He's a big fan of How Stuff Works
podcasts in general. And if you guys have been to
our Facebook page, you may have seen a picture Chris
(01:56):
and I were sporting a pair of alpaca wool hats,
and these are hats that he picked up while he
was doing something he calls the happiness plunge. Packers are keen. Yeah,
so the happiness plunges. This idea he had where he
decided he wanted to really follow his dreams and try
to make the world a better place than it was
(02:16):
when he got there. And so the idea is that
he quit his job and he started traveling through the
world really but mostly through Latin America when he started,
and trying to help different communities as he traveled from
place to place, he would listen to the house Stuff
Works podcasts in between those places. Well, I wanted to
read a paragraph from this letter. It's actually a fairly
(02:39):
long letter, so I'm not gonna read the whole thing,
but here's the paragraph. My goal is a travelers to
leave each place better than how I found it, which
I do by volunteering everywhere I go. I've had volunteering
experiences such as feeding the elderly at a nursing home
in Mexico, installing solar panels in rural Honduras, attracting book
donations for a rural library project in Peru, playing with
kids at orphanages in Costa Rica and Ecuador, designing a
(03:00):
financing strategy for a new NGO and El Salvador, and
marketing an organization that turns donated used bikes into bike machines,
washing machines, blenders, water well pumps, etcetera in Guatemala. There's
a lot I can offer as an engineer slash NBA
and there's more to the letter than that, but that's
kind of what gave us the idea for this podcast.
We wanted to talk about technology that people have taken
(03:24):
and repurposed to benefit people who are in developing nations
who don't have access to the same level of technology
we do. And in fact, if we were to give
those people the technology that we take for granted every day,
it would not necessarily be helpful because their conditions, their
day to day conditions are so vastly different from the
(03:44):
ones we are used to that they would not necessarily
be able to take advantage of that tech. So they're
actually taking kind of a lower tech approach by repurposing
stuff that was never meant to do the things that
it now does. And we thought, what a cool idea,
So we want to kind of get into that and
sort of talk about the different ways people have tried
(04:05):
to to uh accomplish this and uh, I'm sorry you're
gonna say something, well, I was gonna say that. Uh
and in some of these places, uh, you know, these
are the places where, for example, cell phones have really
vaulted over land lines because a lot of a lot
of areas have not ever been wired for landline telephone used. So, um,
(04:26):
you know now that uh cell phone talk technology is
so inexpensive, I mean just the basic phone technology. Um,
and you know, many people in places such as uh,
you know Africa for example. UM, more of the rural areas. UM.
You know, really it's a an urban versus rural thing anyway.
But but um, yeah, a lot of more the rural
(04:47):
places where or places that are more removed where there's
a lot of distance in between that area and an
urban area. UM. Uh cell phone usage. You know, it's
easier to put up the towers than it is to
wire those places for landlines. So um you know that
In doing research for other podcasts where we've talked about phones. UM,
(05:08):
I've just run across stories what they've said, Well, you know,
cell phone usage per capita maybe higher in some of
these other places, simply because everybody's got a cell phone.
They never had a landline phone. Right, it's now that
they dropped one for the other. It's that they completely
leap frogged. Yeah, and and and and the play and
some of these inventions that we're going to talk about
um or these technologies. Uh, they may not necessarily have
(05:31):
uh for example, electricity seven, but they might be able
to repurpose some of these other things uh inexpensively to
improve their lives through this other technology. And it is
a lot of it is very inventive. I actually saw
Apollo thirteen invoked in one of the articles that I
was searching for because, um, if you know the story
(05:54):
that was the mission where um, they the astronauts had serious,
serious problem because they're some of the technology failed, um
and they had to come up with other stuff on
the fly. I know that was actually the uh, the
genesis of the idea for the TV show Scrap Peep Challenge,
which in the United States was Junkyard Wars, where you
(06:15):
had to just throw some other stuff together and had
sort of this the same idea you would you would
you would go through a junkyard and you would salvage
different machines in order to build something that was specifically
intended to achieve a a particular goal which was established
at the beginning of the show. So you would have
a goal like it might be traversed this this landscape here,
(06:37):
and you're going to have to be able to go up,
you know, a twenty degree incline, and there's going to
be a section that's gonna be rocky, and there might
even be a section where you have to travel across water.
So you have to build a machine that's capable capable
of doing all those things, but all you have is
whatever is in this junkyard. Yeah, and of course they
did up mids TV, so they'd end up seeding the
junkyard a handful of necessary parts. But is if nobody ever,
(07:01):
you know, they don't know everything that's in the junkyard,
I'm sure they go, well, it turns out that there
isn't any of this stuff and we're kind of stuck.
So it would make it would not make for interesting television,
so they would they would put in things in there.
But here's the thing is that people are really inventive, right,
and they can come up with solutions that you do
not anticipate. So even if you were to seed a
(07:21):
junkyard with things that you think, oh, well, clearly, they'll
want to build a device that can do this by
using this, this, and this, it may turn out that
they end up getting stuff that you did not see
that junkyard with and they build something that works, you know,
as well or perhaps even better than what you had
conceived of when you were seating it. Because people adapt
(07:42):
to the situation they are in, and they are very
quick to adapt their technology as well. And in fact,
we have seen that in developing nations, and a lot
of the projects we're gonna be talking about kind of
they didn't start this process. They just saw something that
was happening and decided to help it along. Uh. And
there are a couple of organizations I want to mention
(08:02):
before we even get into specifics. One of those is
called Random Hacks of Kindness and another is called Geeks
Without Bounds, And both of these organizations are dedicated to
helping developing nations through various hack projects. Although and both
of those cases, they are more focused on the software
(08:23):
side of things. So, like you were saying, you know,
cell phone use being much more prevalent than landline use.
A lot of these involve apps for phones that would
alert people to things that affect them in their daily lives. Um,
and things that other people just wouldn't think of because
it's not something that affects us, right, So a lot
(08:44):
of these are programs that would not that that are
again on that software side, that are not about hardware hacks.
We're really focusing mostly on hardware hacks today, although some
other stuff might pop up to yeah, this is um.
Also keep in mind that a lot of the technology
that that can be used for ther you know, it's
perfectly good technology. Um, you know, we're not talking necessarily
(09:07):
about junk. Although it might be things that other people
have cast off as being obsolete. In some cases it's
you know, completely functional and uh you know, there's there's
no reason to overdo it. Yeah, there's some cases where
it's not even repurposing in the sense of making something
do something it wasn't meant to do, like repurposing, just
(09:28):
as in reusing. So there are a lot of these
programs that allow you to do things like donate your
old electronics to various programs, so like old computers are.
That's the perfect example. It might be a computer that
you think is obsolete because it can't run the latest
stuff that you like to run, but for a developing nation,
it might be a very useful asset. But we're really
(09:50):
looking at in this podcast technology that's been turned into
doing something else. And I was going to start with
Maya Pedal and Maya All I'm I'm assuming that's the
organization that Adam was talking about in his letter, because
Maya Pedal is the is a Guatemalan organization that takes
(10:12):
donated bikes, mainly donated from the United States and from Canada,
and they take those bikes to either recondition them and
sell them or they use the parts to build what
they call and I'm going to completely butcher the pronunciation
of this biking mackinas or bike powered machines pedal powered machines.
And so what they're doing is they're actually taking these
(10:34):
bikes apart to some extent, and using that pedal power.
So instead of it turning a wheel, it's turning some
other mechanical part to accomplish a task that they might
otherwise not have a mechanical opportunity to to address it,
like things like and then simple stuff you know, Adam
(10:54):
and mentioned things like a washing machine. Well that's a
that's a perfect example. You've got a big tub that
you put the water in, the soap in, the clothing in,
and you have an agitator in there, something that turns
around and moves the clothing so that it creates this
agitation which will help the soap and water work out
all the soil and everything else that's in the clothing.
(11:18):
You have that agitator hooked up through a series of
of gears and chains or belts to a pedal system
on a bike, and it might even have the back
half of the bike more or less intact, where you've
got the seat and everything, and you sit down the seat,
you pedal the petals, it turns the agitator and it
ends up washing clothing that way. There's actually a guy
(11:41):
in Texas who had um a blog. The last entry
I saw was in two but there was a guy
in Texas named John Wells who was building. He built
something very similar to that called the He called it
the bike O Worsher Worsher spelled w O R s
h e R and through Texas Fashion UH. It was
(12:01):
part of the Southwest Texas Alternative Energy and Sustainable Living
Field Laboratory. So the idea was that he was building
stuff that would allow you to have a sustainable life
where you're not depending so much on things like electricity.
And it was a really cool project. But it's very
similar to the stuff you see in these developing nations now.
(12:22):
In the case of Texas, obviously it's not due to
lack of electricity. It's more of kind of a an
UH environmentally friendly lifestyle that he wants to adopt, right
But in the case of Guatemala, it may be necessity
because not all places in rural rural areas of these
(12:42):
these countries have access to regular electricity. Yeah, yeah, that's true.
And one of the things that struck me and doing
research for this podcast is the similarity of some of
these inventions to things that you might see in the
pages of Make magazine or among the er community, um
you know, talking about different bike machines. For example, I
(13:04):
remember watching a video probably more than a year ago
now where uh, some some folks in San Francisco basically
collect old bikes and what they do is they cut
them apart and make new bikes out of them. I
mean they're they're strange contraptions, things with different size wheels
and all sorts of others. Mostly too. It's like an
art bike's community, and it's mostly because they can and
(13:26):
and want to have fun doing that. But you can,
you can do the same kinds of things to to
uh uh, to create sustainable UM machinery. Yeah. I saw
a great video from the Maya Pedal Group where they
showed a de grainer and it was what it was
was it was this it looked like the back half
(13:47):
of a bicycle. But then there was this shoot that
you could feed uh corn through corn that's actually still
on the cob, uncooked corn, and you would feed it
through and had a series of gears that would end
up pulling the kernels off the cob so that you
could de grain that corn very very efficiently. You just
(14:09):
turn the you know, you're peddling, that's what's turning the
gears and uh. It was so much faster than doing
it by hand, and it actually saves a lot of
time and effort. So that was another example. But they
had lots of other ones that I saw. One that
was a a pedal powered blender, and they were showing
how they were using aloe plants. They would take the
(14:31):
skin off the allow plant and chop it up, put
it in with some water and a blender, uh, and
then uh start peddling. And they would use this to
create things like shampoos that they could then sell, and
it was a way of generating money because these are
in general, the communities that these these projects are benefiting
are incredibly poor compared to the lives that most of
(14:58):
the people in the west, uh, like the developed nations
are used to. So for example, for for me and Chris,
you know, the thought of Uh, the reason why these
devices are so important is because they they take away
the reliance upon things like kerosene, which might cost four
dollars a week, and that is prohibitively expensive. I mean
(15:20):
that is that's a totally different world than the world
we live in. Yeah. Basically, if you're listening to this podcast,
you know this, this is kind of a different different experience. Yeah.
So yeah, the and and there was a lot of
other examples of the same sort of thing, mostly, you know,
all these really cool versions of bikes, uh, to do
things like make tiles. There was a bicycle bicycle powered
(15:43):
thresher for for harvesting crops. There there were water pumps.
I saw one where a guy was riding a bike
and water was coming out of a of a pipe
and it was it was like a bicycle powered well yeah, um.
I actually ran across an invention from the Nippon Basic
(16:03):
company in Japan called the cyclo Clean and basically it's
it's designed to you add it to the bike. It's
kind of hard to describe, you might want to look
it up, but it's it's got water containers so somebody
would ride there by and it goes on your bike. Uh,
an existing bike, so it's not unmodified if you will,
you don't want to cut a bike apart or anything
(16:25):
like that as a moving bike. And uh so you
ride to a place a source of water. Now, if
you think about lakes or streams, creeks, uh, you know,
most of us listening to this podcast probably know all
sorts of micro organisms live in that water. A lot
of it isn't safe to drink, and a lot of
people around the world don't have access to clean water. Um.
(16:47):
So what this does is you pour the water into
the containers and as you uh you know, using the
kinetic energy of pedaling the bike, the Cyclo clean will
filter the water. So it actually creates potable water by
the energy of the bike, and it's it's portable and potable.
(17:08):
So it's that that's a pretty nifty um, I guess,
just potent pot but um, actually, I just want to
point out before we move on real quick. UM, A
lot of the devices that I found, uh in researching
this episode are not things we can talk about because
they're they're invented, they're intended to be inexpensive, and they're new,
(17:33):
so it's not really repurposing technology. There are so many
really cool devices, it might it might also be worth
investigating it again in the future. Some of the really
cool devices that are you know, they'll be like a
twenty dollar or something and it completely does a very
useful function and speeds life. And I'm like, oh, man,
if I could just use like we you know, Dean
(17:54):
came in the whole thing about you know, his his
water projects, which I think we talked about in the
Cayman podcast, but that was years ago anyway, So I
wanted to also mention, Yeah, Maya Pedal if you if
you live in the United States or Canada and you're
interested in donating an old bicycle to this. Maya Pedal
(18:14):
does have its own website and you can learn more
about the program and how you can participate. They also
invite people to come down and visit their facilities in Guatemala. Obviously,
you can even work there for a while, volunteer there
for a while, and help do things like make repairs
or design new machines. Um. It's very much a hacker
(18:35):
culture in the sense of they have they have specific
tasks they need to achieve, they have a specific set
of resources, they they they are at their disposal and
they have to find the way to make the resources
meet their their needs. So they're not interested in making
it look pretty. They're not interested in any of that.
Their aesthetics are not important. Yeah, it's all about achieving
(18:59):
the goal. And and that's something that appeals to a
lot of hackers who are all about, hey, yeah, I
know that this was meant to do this one thing,
but you know, if we just changed it a little bit,
we could totally do this other thing. Let's see if
we can make it happen. And uh, you read a
lot about that kind of stuff in these in these stories. Um,
(19:19):
there was another one that I wanted to mention, very
similar kind of idea again using bicycles. A fellow named
how Watts invented something designed to help countries that are
all about dealing with e waste. So, you know, old electronics,
if you're right, yeah, if you've ever if you've ever
(19:40):
tried to get rid of your electronics, maybe maybe you've
tried to put them in some sort of e waste
recycle program. One of the problems of of some of
those programs, not all of them, they're not all created equal,
but some of those programs, yes, some of these programs
ship that stuff off to various developing nations where they
(20:01):
have an industry all around recycling that material. And it's
mostly about recapturing the metals that are used in those products,
mainly copper, yeah, and lead to that's another one of
the big ones, recapturing the copper and lead that's used
in these electronics. It can be a very dangerous thing
(20:22):
to do if you aren't being if you're if you're
not following particular steps right and and it can release
a lot of toxic elements into the environment and also
affect people's health. Yeah. The thing is too that in
in some of these cases, the people who are disassembling
the electronics aren't given the proper tools to do that,
and some I've read about people who had to put
(20:44):
materials into a fire essentially intending to melt it all down,
and of course in doing so, it releases toxic chemical
toxic chemicals, uh, into this the soil um people in
the atmosphere. The people in the immediate area have health
problems as a result of the metals leaching into their soil.
(21:05):
It can it can affect areas even further out from
the immediate area. It's it's one of those. In a way,
it really shows that environmental concerns and ecology go beyond
just the point. Like there's a there's like a ring effect,
right you you move one ring further out from the center,
and you can still see where the effects are and
(21:27):
they might not be a severe and they may not
be the same effects as you would see right at
the point of contact, but it's still negative. Well, in
this case, very it's exactly what you're talking about. You know,
a lot of these UH countries, what they do is
that they will use fire to melt stuff down. Like
like let's say copper wire that's insulated, So you've got
(21:48):
a rubber insulation around copper wire. Well, they want to
get to the copper. They want to get the rubber
off of there. And what's an efficient way of doing that. Well,
you could burn the rubber off, but that can release
a lot of toxic chemicals into the atmost sphere and
get it into the ground as well. UH. And then
you also have essentially you have burnt copper, which is
not as valuable as copper that has not been put
(22:09):
through this process. Chris and I will be back to
talk a little bit more about this repurposing technology for
developing countries idea of First, let's take a quick break.
So what Watts did was he built a machine that
(22:31):
was again a bicycle powered machine where he called it
the E Source and it has a grinder in it
and it has also a metal separator. Uh it's it's
it's like a centrifuge in a way. And what you
do is you put the copper wire into the grinder
and you pedal the petals. Some grinders actually grind that
(22:55):
up so that the rubber and the and the copper
come apart. It shreds the copper y air, so you
get smaller segments of copper wire and the rubbers is
pulled right off of the copper. The spinning plate actually
spends so that it separates out the copper from the rubbers.
So then you've got these rubber pellets on one side
(23:17):
and you've got the copper on the other side. And
it means that you no longer have the danger of
burning this stuff and releasing the toxic chemicals, and you
can actually recycle the rubber as well. So it it
also adds a second level of revenue to this process,
which before was all about the metal because you know,
you couldn't use the rubber after you've burnt it off.
(23:38):
But now you've got this these rubber pellets that you
can actually use in other forms of recycling. So it
adds benefit to the process and it takes away some
of the more dangerous parts of recycling electronics. So that
was his invention. There's actually video on the web. He's
(23:59):
got a website about the source. So if you and
it's E S O U R C E. If you
do a search for that, you can actually find his
website and learn more about it and the project that
he's been working on. It's really really interesting. So that's
another example of again using bicycles. There are a lot
of those, because bicycles are one of those that's a
(24:19):
piece of technology that's common around the world. And uh
and and it's one of those that um it's it's
so much more accessible than other kinds of technology, and
so it's not dependent upon electricity or fuel it's got
uh it's it's really attractive for these communities that might
not otherwise be able to afford the sort of technology
(24:41):
that can do whatever it is these machines do. Yeah.
In in a similar vein. You actually wrote about one
of the technologies I wanted to talk about. UM and uh,
you know, one of the serious problems that they have
in some developing nations or a lot of developing nations,
I should say, is uh uh you know babies who
(25:01):
are are born prematurely um and uh you know, uh,
they need infubation to to keep them warm. And uh,
I think it's really clever. There's Jonathan wrote an article
for the website how Stuff Works dot com on on
using engines to serve as incubators. Um. It's really really
(25:23):
cool stuff. Basically, uh, you know they uh it uses
a an engine to to generate the heat, but um,
it also has a battery powered back up. And it
was actually developed by the Center for Integration of Medicine
and Innovative Technology or SIMMIT, and a a company called
(25:45):
Design That Matters UM, which uh you know is into
all kinds of different design really. Um, they had a
basically they had a contest to see who could who
could come up with the best uh contraption for this
and it you know uses um basically different parts of
the automotive assembly for you know, um uh there's a
(26:09):
handrail built into it. For example, and there you know,
they're parts that that come that are not part of it,
the automotive kit, but the rest of it. You know,
they use the headlights to generate heat and HV a
C form you know, to stir the heat around. Yeah,
(26:31):
it's it's that was definitely an interesting project to read
about because again it was uh it was this idea
that it's not just the problem of um of getting
the tech to them, it's getting tech that is easy
to maintain. And it's a lot easier to maintain the
basic parts of an automobile. Again, and technology that has
(26:53):
fairly wide distribution than it is for something that's incredibly specialized.
So if a hospital sent uh A a high tech
incubator to a developing nation and that incubator were to
break down, as you know technology tends to do over time,
it's a lot harder for that. It may be impossible
(27:14):
for that that organization to make repairs. It may take
months to get a broken machine fixed when it's got
that level of sophistication, and the tools that the people
have don't meet that level of sophistication. So being able
to create technology that can accomplish the same goal, but
(27:35):
but is built from much more basic types of tech
that have a lot more distribution around the world. Means
that you have made it far more accessible. Because again,
in fact I read this, and this was from Make magazine,
there was a great article by Paul spin Rad called
design for hack in Medicine, and in that there was
(27:56):
a little fact that said about medical technology that reaches
poor country is hand me down equipment designed for first
world facilities. That's the problem because these are not first
world facilities that these these devices are going to, so
there's limited use there. Um. You don't you don't go
in and plug something into the wall in some of
these cases. You don't have a wall to plug into
(28:18):
in some of these cases, so you have to come
up with a new way of powering that. And I
think I misspoke a few minutes ago when I was
talking about using the car engines. They don't, you know,
put the kid on the engine. That would not be
very good. Um. Now they used the engines for parts. Um,
And that's because the the you know, people have the
(28:38):
tech around and generally people know how to repair a car,
so they know what the different pieces do, and uh,
you know, the parts would be available and then, uh,
I want to talk a little bit about a fellow
named Jose Gomez Marquez. Now he's really looked into this
medical issue about creating medical equipment for countries that do
(29:02):
not have first world medical facilities, and uh, there's a
whole list of different kinds of technology that he and
his team have come up with, uh to help out
these countries. One of those was a device that actually
uses sunlight to sterilize surgical tools, which again that's that's
(29:23):
phenomenal and according to the articles is it uses a bucket,
a pressure cooker, and one forty pocket sized mirrors, which
all of which were purchased out of a Nicaraguan market,
and then they built out this device that uses sun
sunlight to end up heating these surgical tools so they
(29:45):
are sterilized because they don't have electricity or at least
not enough electricity to power a regular autoclave for sterilizing tools,
and that if they were to go with one that
ran on fuel, it would cost them so much money.
And again we're talking small amounts of money for most
of us, but for these communities it's it's prohibitively expensive
(30:05):
to run those sort of devices, which means that you
are risking some major medical catastrophes if you do not
have properly sterilized surgical tools. You know, you're talking about
possibility for terrible infections that could really make patient mortality
rates skyrocket. So this was a way of creating a
device that doesn't depend on electricity. It just uses sunlight,
(30:28):
which you know too, it's much easier to to to
get hold of than it would for something like electricity.
So that was a good example. But then the article
actually goes into other things that were developed specifically for
this UH, for this community and communities like it through
(30:51):
m I T. Which was this idea of medi kits.
Have you read about these UM I did? Yeah. Gmess
Marquez is UH program director for m I T s
Innovations and International Health Program. And then the idea behind
these kits and this program is that um these these
parts and pieces are available two UH physicians and who
(31:15):
are working in these areas, they might be able to
find that, and so the point was to teach them
how to use everyday stuff to make equipment that they
would have. You know, they would be familiar with his
physicians in the first world, they would already be familiar
with that the pre made, manufactured version of this. Now
(31:37):
that he's his group wants to teach people how to
take uh these parts and do it themselves on on
the fly, right from what's on hand. And in fact,
uh they they have these med kits that come in
in five different variations. So there's drug delivery, lateral flow diagnostics,
lab on a chip, vital signs, agricultural prosthetics, which the
(32:03):
agricultural prosthetics one is pretty pretty wild to me, but
we'll we'll, I'll talk about that in a second. Anyway,
it's talking about taking a lot of like Chris was saying,
a lot of basic elements that you can find in
other forms of machinery and electronics, So talking about things
like um plungers or bicycle pumps or compressors, tilt sensors,
(32:25):
that sort of stuff, these basic elements, and then teaching
people different ways of putting those things together to accomplish
whatever your goals are. And in fact, they talked a
lot about how they learned about using toys parts from
toys as medical equipment, so things like a remote controlled
(32:46):
helicopter and removing some of the machinery from that in
order to create a medical device I talked about even
there was an electric mechanical ferris wheel toy that could
be double as a centrifew just with some modification. Chris
and I have a little bit more to talk about
on this particular topic, but before we get to that,
(33:07):
let's take another quick break. The comparable medical equipment if
this country were to try and buy, it would be
really expensive, like we're talking about really sophisticated medical equipment,
but that you could accomplish the same outcome with these
(33:27):
low tech approaches just by repurposing the technology and suddenly
the cost drops dramatically. So suddenly these these things that
were out of reach for these medical facilities become attainable.
It just means that you have to learn how to
adapt this technology so that they can do what you
needed to do. And the article was so fascinating to
(33:48):
me because it talks so much about how they found
They discovered that there were people in the field already
doing this right. It had there are people who were
taking aquipment and saying all right, well, I'm just gonna
take this one piece of equipment I have, and I'm
going to alter it in this way so it can
do what I did needed to do better than it
(34:10):
can right now, because the the use cases might be
very specific and the equipment might be very generalized. And
so you might have a generalized piece of equipment that
can do a lot of stuff, but it can't do
it as well as a modified piece of equipment could.
And they were starting to see how people were modifying
things and improvising out in the field in order to
(34:32):
make repairs or to make modifications to get better results.
Uh is really really interesting and UH also really speaks
a lot to human ingenuity. Yeah. Well, I think I
think for somebody who would be trained, um, in a
modern hospital to do medical care, you would be thinking
(34:54):
of the technology that that we have available to us.
And I think that the trick is to get people
to see the similarities between everyday stuff and the high
tech equivalent. Um. You know the photo I I saw
in the article I read about about this program. Uh,
they show him using a a drinking straw for a pipette. Now,
(35:18):
you know, I would think, uh, myself, and I'm not
a medical professional by any stretch of the imagination, but
you know, having elementary chemistry classes in high school, thinking,
you know, well that that's kind of you know, that's
that's not as scientific and it's not as sanitary. But uh,
you know, if if if you do things carefully and
you know what you're doing, you can still do a
(35:41):
lot with that technology available. And that's I think that's
the point is to draw that parallels that you see. Yes,
I mean you are achieving the same goal with this
everyday technology that you would be with this highly precise
manufactured stuff, and you can do it with what you
have and it will will help people. Um. It is
(36:01):
worth pointing out that a lot of there are are
initiatives and non governmental organizations that are repurposing uh less
modern technology, you know, stuff that's five years out of date,
ten years out of date, so there's still perfectly viable
and and sending it to to other countries that don't
have access to those technologies, which is which is you
(36:23):
know great, rather than scrapping it. Um, you know, somebody
else is able to put it to use, but not
everyone can use that. So these these initiatives are certainly
very valuable. Yeah, And getting back to the medicate stuff,
what the the team discovered was that when they started
to distribute these medicates, Uh, let me read a quote
from the articles as we designed the limits of our
early kids carefully, but when users began to snap on,
(36:46):
extend and test their creations, something emerged that we did
not anticipate. They hacked our kids, which is what we
were talking about, Like they made the kids modular, like
these ideas of these modular kits, so that you could
create different as all as like the medical version of
Ardwin Knows Stuff. It was a very modular approach to
(37:06):
creating medical equipment. But they were going beyond the modular
approach and adding in elements that were not part of
the kit, or physically altering parts of the kit in
order to do what they needed it to do. And
they started to see that, okay, well, with this sort
of mentality, which makes perfect sense. You know that they
are trying to to meet the needs of whatever their
(37:29):
community happens to be. They said, all right, we have
to think to design these kits with hacking in mind,
knowing that the stuff is going to get hacked when
we send it out. We have to design the kits.
And they said, while it's impossible to predict every type
of device a kit can produce, you can start with
a core set of devices start to add degrees of
(37:50):
freedom to that core and then try to anticipate in
design areas in which those degrees will be hacked. And
the reason why they want to make sure that they
take this into account is one so that the devices
are as accessible and useful as possible, but too, and
possibly more importantly, they want to put safety measures in
place so that if you were to hack this medikit,
(38:14):
you would not end up creating a device that could
cause more harm than good. So that was their other
concern was that, all right, well, we want to make
sure that whatever we design, it's not going to end
up killing people when a hack goes wrong, because not
every time hackers know this, Not every attempt is a success.
Sometimes you take stuff apart and it just don't work
(38:36):
no more. Uh, some of us. That's the only kind
of hacker we are. I'm guilty of that. I can
take things apart really well, putting it back together and
making it work. Okay, it's a baby step process, people.
So anyway, where did these extra pieces come from? I
don't even know what this fits in. UM. I wanted
(38:59):
to talk a little bit about the Agricultural Prosthetic medic Kit,
a flavor of med kits they had because that was
one that I thought was kind of interesting. So the
kit essentially has a universal gripper. So this is a
device for people who have lost a limb and need
needs something in order to be able to uh to
(39:19):
to harvest crops. So it might be something so that
you could pick fruit from a tree. But let's say
you've lost a limb through some terrible injury or illness,
and in some cases that would lead people not to
to want to hire you anymore because there because you're
no longer as effective. So this is a This kit
(39:41):
came with a universal gripper made from PVC bicycle inner
tubes and a soda bottle to attach most farm tools
onto the arm or forearm of an amputee farmer. So
the soda bottle was the part that fit over the
whatever part of the arm remains right, so that would
fit on that, and then the rest would extend from
(40:03):
the soda bottle out ending in the universe in the
universal grippers that it could pull or grip onto whatever
it is you needed and uh and said. Each part
of the kit follows the same three principles. Core device
modifier device and consumables, um. And then it talked about
how and in various articles talked about how people who
received these kits even then would modify them further by
(40:26):
adding in other elements like other stuff to extend the
arm even further than it was already meant to go,
so that it could help people reach crops that otherwise
would be out of their range. So again, people took
the stuff that were that was distributed and made even
more modifications so that it was more useful for their
own daily lives. Uh, fascinating stuff. And and again I
(40:51):
mean the the ingenuity here, like people noticing that a
noisemaker in a toy could be used as an alarm
system for a medical device, so that when something is
getting to a critical parameter, it goes noises made so
that it alerts people. Things like that, like where they
don't have that specialized equipment, they're building it themselves. It's
(41:12):
really interesting to me. Yeah, well that's that's what tech
stuff is about. UM. You know, if you're long term listener,
you know that Jonathan and I like to talk about
technology and people, how it how it affects people, And UM,
I think this is this is really awesome because a
lot of these devices that people are taking apart are
are either obsolete or are broken, and they're repurposing them
(41:34):
and helping other people with that, and I just I
just think that's absolutely fantastic. Yeah, it's it's not just ingenuity,
but compassion and those two, those two elements coming together.
That's that's like the best of humanity, right. If you're
talking about caring for other people and using your your
creative endeavors to come up with new solutions, that's a
great story. And uh, and so guys, if you have
(41:57):
interest in this, I highly recommend you look into some
of these projects further and see maybe there's something you
can help out with. Maybe there's something you can either
donate money to, or even better, if you are able
to donate your time or expertise to some of these projects,
you can make an enormous difference in the lives of
other people and and bring a help bring a better
(42:18):
living experience to people who really are having a totally
different kind of life than the one most of us
are used to. Yeah. I mean, even if it's it's
just a small thing to you, it may make a
real difference in someone else's life. That's true. So I'm
glad that we had this discussion. I think that that's
a good overview of the subject. Now there are a
lot more examples that are out there. We really just
(42:41):
covered some some pretty broad topics. But I do recommend
you look into it if this is something that interests
you and uh and maybe you'll find your passion like
Adam did. Who you know, he he really uprooted his
entire life in order to pursue this, and that's that's amazing.
Happiness Plunge. Indeed, in fact, that Happiness Plunge dot com folks,
if you want to take a look at his website
(43:02):
because it's it's a crazy, wonderful sort of thing to do. Um,
I'm not sure that I am the kind of person
who could who could make that commitment. I am amazed
at people who do, and thankful for them as well.
And that wraps up this classic episode of tech Stuff.
If you guys have any suggestions for future episodes, why
(43:24):
not get in touch with me let me know. You
can send me an email the addresses tech Stuff at
how stuff works dot com or pop on over to
our website that's tech Stuff podcast dot com. You will
find an archive of all of our past shows. You'll
find links to our presence on social media, and you
will also find a link to our online store, where
every purchase you make goes to help this show and
(43:45):
we greatly appreciate it, and I will talk to you
again really soon. Tex Stuff is a production of I
Heart Radio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts from my
heart Radio, visit i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or
wherever you listen to your favorite shows. H
TechStuff News
Hosts And Creators
Oz Woloshyn
Karah Preiss
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