Health Care Innovation – 5 TED Talks

Providing safe, effective care is the goal of every international health organization. But doing it cost-effectively, while reaching every patient who needs it, can prove difficult.

These five TED Talks explore some of the ingenious tech being created by innovators all around the world to deliver life-saving care for less.

Lifesaving scientific tools made of paper
Physicist and inventor Manu Prakash demos Paperfuge — a hand-powered centrifuge that can do the work of a $1,000 machine with no electricity required.

Inventor Manu Prakash turns everyday materials into powerful scientific devices, from paper microscopes to a clever new mosquito tracker. From the TED Fellows stage, he demos Paperfuge, a hand-powered centrifuge inspired by a spinning toy that costs 20 cents to make and can do the work of a $1,000 machine, no electricity required.

How we're using drones to deliver blood and save lives
Inaccessibility is a major obstacle to delivering quality health care around the world. That’s why entrepreneur Keller Rinaudo created Zipline, a drone delivery system that transports blood and plasma to remote clinics in East Africa.

Keller Rinaudo wants everyone on earth to have access to basic health care, no matter how hard it is to reach them. With his start-up Zipline, he has created the world's first drone delivery system to operate at national scale, transporting blood and plasma to remote clinics in East Africa with a fleet of electric autonomous aircraft.

Medical tech designed to meet Africa's needs
Tech innovator and engineer Soyapi Mumba built software to support health care infrastructure in sub-Saharan Africa, tracking health records, creating unique patient IDs and more.

In sub-Saharan Africa, power outages, low technology penetration, slow internet and understaffed hospitals plague health care systems. To make progress on these problems in Malawi, TED Fellow Soyapi Mumba and his team created a new system from scratch -- from the software that powers their electronic health records to the infrastructure used to support it.

A new weapon in the fight against superbugs
Drug-resistant superbugs could kill as many as 10 million people by 2050. Radiation scientist David Brenner is working on a method to eliminate these drug-resistant bugs safely by using ultraviolet light.

Since the widespread use of antibiotics began in the 1940s, we've tried to develop new drugs faster than bacteria can evolve -- but this strategy isn't working. Drug-resistant bacteria known as superbugs killed nearly 700,000 people last year, and by 2050 that number could be 10 million -- more than cancer kills each year.

A new way to heal hearts without surgery
Pediatric cardiologist Franz Freudenthal is mending sick childrens’ hearts using a device that relies on the same principles as traditional loom weaving.

At the intersection of medical invention and indigenous culture, pediatric cardiologist Franz Freudenthal mends holes in the hearts of children across the world, using a device born from traditional Bolivian loom weaving. "The most complex problems in our time," he says, "can be solved with simple techniques, if we are able to dream."

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