Grant: Collaborative Research and Training Experience

The NSERC CREATE in Engineering Health Equity will prepare its trainees to address the persistent problem of unequal access to healthcare services and technologies for individuals living in remote and low-resource settings. One solution to this challenge is to apply the principles of frugal innovation to the design and development of medical devices. Frugal innovation is a new paradigm in engineering that emphasizes equity and sustainability in technology development. It leads to devices that can be used effectively in regions with shortages of specialist personnel, maintained with limited access to replacement components, and function reliably in the absence of reliable power and other infrastructure. Our program will collaborate with partners working in remote communities in Northern Canada and sub-Saharan Africa to design and test medical devices that will address healthcare needs identified by those partners. Many of our trainees will carry out a portion of their research in one of those locales, collaborating directly with students and professionals from those communities. The program will develop trainees' knowledge of frugal and open-source medical device design, enablers and barriers to diffusion of frugal medical technologies, challenges in remote and global health, and considerations of equity, diversity and inclusion relevant to frugal medical innovation through a series of intersecting communities of practice, which are frameworks for collaborative problem solving and mentorship that are widely used in technology firms. In addition to our technology development research, we will apply research methods from management and public health studies to evaluate the effectiveness of the communities-of-practice framework for promoting access to and adoption of frugal medical technologies. The medical device sector has acknowledged the centrality of health equity to its corporate social responsibility. We anticipate that the CREATE in Engineering Health Equity will uniquely equip our graduates to lead the evolution of the medical device industry toward addressing the health needs of marginalized communities.