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.

Scientists who are working to discover new medicines often use robots to prepare samples of cells, allowing them to test chemicals to identify those that might be used to treat diseases. Students will meet a scientist who works to identify new medicines. She created free software that ''looks'' at images of cells and determines which images show cells that have responded to the potential medicines. Students will learn about how this technology is currently enabling research to identify new antibiotics to treat tuberculosis. Students will complete hands-on activities that demonstrate how new medicines can be discovered using robots and computer software, starring the student as ''the computer.'' In the process, the students learn about experimental design, including positive and negative controls.

Scientists who are working to discover new medicines often use robots to prepare samples of cells, allowing them to test chemicals to identify those that might be used to treat diseases. Students will meet a scientist who works to identify new medicines. She created free software that ''looks'' at images of cells and determines which images show cells that have responded to the potential medicines. Students will learn about how this technology is currently enabling research to identify new antibiotics to treat tuberculosis. Students will complete hands-on activities that demonstrate how new medicines can be discovered using robots and computer software, starring the student as ''the computer.'' In the process, the students learn about experimental design, including positive and negative controls.

This video lesson shows students that math can play a role in understanding how an infectious disease spreads and how it can be controlled. During this lesson, students will see and use both deterministic and probabilistic models and will learn by doing through role-playing exercises. The primary exercises between video segments of this lesson are class-intensive simulation games in which members of the class 'infect' each other under alternative math modeling assumptions about disease progression. Also there is an occasional class discussion and local discussion with nearby classmates.

For the first time in history, the global demand for freshwater is overtaking its supply in many parts of the world. The U.N. predicts that by 2025, more than half of the countries in the world will be experiencing water stress or outright shortages. Lack of water can cause disease, food shortages, starvation, migrations, political conflict, and even lead to war. Models of cooperation, both historic and contemporary, show the way forward. The first half of the course details the multiple facets of the water crisis. Topics include water systems, water transfers, dams, pollution, climate change, scarcity, water conflict/cooperation, food security, and agriculture. The second half of the course describes innovative solutions: Adaptive technologies and adaptation through policy, planning, management, economic tools, and finally, human behaviors required to preserve this precious and imperiled resource. Several field trips to water/wastewater/biosolids reuse and water-energy sites will help us to better comprehend both local and international challenges and solutions.

This course is a collaborative offering of Sana, Partners in Health, and the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI). The goal of this course is the development of innovations in information systems for developing countries that will (1) translate into improvement in health outcomes, (2) strengthen the existing organizational infrastructure, and (3) create a collaborative ecosystem to maximize the value of these innovations. The course will be taught by guest speakers who are internationally recognized experts in the field and who, with their operational experiences, will outline the challenges they faced and detail how these were addressed.This OCW site combines resources from the initial Spring 2011 offering of the course (numbered HST.184) and the Spring 2012 offering (numbered HST.S14).

The video lesson aims to expand students’ knowledge of abortion as a global health issue. Induced abortion is one of the most contested and controversial problems in the field of global health and an issue that concerns fetus’ rights, women’s rights and human rights. This lesson focuses particularly on abortion stigma and its consequences for women’s health worldwide. The topic of abortion will be discussed within a context of dominant ideas of womanhood, motherhood, and sexuality, addressing abortion not just as a health issue, but also as an ideological battle over gender and sexuality.

Our planet is currently being challenged by dramatic changes to earth and human systems under the influence of climate change and variability. These include changes of population and environmental dynamics that impacts human health. Thus, climate change is considered the biggest threat to human health in the 21st century. Health impacts can be direct typically related to extreme weather events; indirect with linkages to climate change induced environmental alterations and damage or in relation to displacement, conflict and social disruption. This presentation provides a series of examples of changes of environmental and social determinants of health with negative or positive health impacts. These include impacts on communicable diseases, non-communicable diseases and mental health of importance in particular in vulnerable urban and rural settings as well as among sensitive community groups exposed to variations in temperature and precipitation patterns.

This presentation provides an introduction and explores the trends in the five sexual and reproductive health priority areas over the last decades:
Maternal and newborn health, family planning, unsafe abortion, sexually transmitted infections and sexual health.

The purpose of this video lesson is to give the students an introduction to the concept continuum of care within the field of sexual and reproductive health. Malaria in pregnancy will be used as an example to demonstrate why it is important to understand that health and disease and the management hereof is not linked to one time point in life or to one place in the health system. The students will learn that to understand the health of today and of tomorrow we need to understand the health of yesterday.

This presentation provides an introduction to the social determinants and drivers of Non-Communicable Diseases (NCD). Poor social determinants leads to a higher risk of illness and a lower chance of having suitable healthcare access, which leads to illness, which in turn leads right back to a deeper level of poor social determinants. In continuation of this, we’ll discuss how to address social determinants and how we need to be involved.

The purpose of this lesson is to expand the student´s knowledge about diabetes.
The world experience an epidemic of type 2 diabetes, especially in low and middle-income countries. Diabetes is no longer a disease of high-income countries and urban cities but impact upon rural populations and the poorest segments of the population.
Participants: Professor Venkat Narayan.

This presentation provides an introduction to the calculation and use of Disability Adjusted Life Years (DALYs). DALY is increasingly used as a measurement for disease burden when comparing the relative burden of specific diseases or a combination of diseases across or within populations.

This session presents an overview of the association between water, sanitation, hygiene and human health. A particular focus upon transmission and treatment of diarrhea disease among small children. Other diseases given particular priority in the presentation include Hepatitis A and E viruses and bacteria that cause cholera or typhoid fever. Likewise, the importance of water-washed diseases, especially infectious skin and eye diseases, such as scabies and trachoma are presented. The preventive actions needed to reduce the burden of the various infectious diseases associated with water, sanitation and hygiene will be introduced.

Infectious diseases have a specific, ethiological cause, e.g. a microbe such as tuberculosis caused by Mycobacterium tuberculosis. However, most people exposed to TB does not develop the disease. What determines this may be poverty, weakening of the person by other diseases or smoking and alcohol. So-called life-style diseases are (also) determined by the way you live, and include prevalent non-communicable diseases such as type 2 diabetes and cardio-vascular diseases, but besides of risk factors such as smoking and drinking or over-eating, the living conditions matter equally and sometimes more. The environment, climate changes, urbanization, socio-economic factors all impact health and disease. When an individual grows older, patterns of his/her diseases changes: the same applies when a society grows ‘older’.

Previously infectious diseases previously caused the majority of ill-health and premature death globally, but in high- and middle-income countries during the 20.th century infectious diseases – with the exception of HIV – declined. Introduction of hygiene and discovery of microbes and later vaccines an antibiotics contributed to the decline, but changing living conditions with better housing, nutrition, water and sanitation were the main drivers of infectious diseases’ decline.

This session will expand the student´s knowledge about human health and quality of life in the context of global and local ecology. Examples will be provided on how environmental management and development influence human health. The session provide an overview of the disease burden attributable to the environment, and much of this burden is placed across different geographical regions of the world. Examples will be presented on the impacts of poor quality water, insufficient access to water, lack of appropriate sanitation and poor personal hygiene. Other examples of environmental health factors included relate to reduced forest cover, unsustainable agricultural production systems, climate change, and poor management of natural resources that significantly influence livelihood, food security and migration patterns.

WHO has estimated that about 100 million people are driven below the poverty line every year because of out-of-pocket payments for health services. Universal Health Coverage (UHC) is a strategy to ensure that all people can use health services of sufficient quality to be effective, while the use of these services does not expose the user to financial hardship. UHC receives increasing global attention, strongly promoted by the WHO, and the strategy is a cornerstone of the global post 2015-agenda for health. In this video lesson we will discuss three central questions for achieving UHC: How to secure adequate financing for health, how to protect the poor from financial consequences of ill health, and how to encourage optimum use of resources.

This presentation provides an overview of the major determinants and specific drivers of epidemiological transition and changes in disease burdens, including demographic factors, urbanisation, diet, economics, climate changes, disasters, health sector reforms, health care and health care technology.