Engineering World Health @ RIT
by Natasha Amadasun | published Feb. 20th, 2015
Engineering World Health (EWH) is an international non-profit organization that focuses on healthcare innovation in the engineering field. They unite engineering students, doctors and other healthcare professionals with underprivileged communities around the world. EWH is committed to inspiring individuals to use their engineering skills to promote change within their community and to remember that healthcare is not only a personal issue, but a global one.
EWH does this by offering travel opportunities to Asia, Africa and Latin America in the forms of both their Summer and Winter Institutes. They also work to provide hands-on experience by hosting a design competition where multidisciplinary teams of students gather together to work on one healthcare-related engineering problem and by having universities begin chapters of their own on campus. RIT has recently joined those ranks.
RIT's chapter is formally known as EWH ROC@RIT. It is a small group made up of students from the Chemical, Biomedical and Electrical Engineering departments, but they are open to more interdepartmental inclusion. They also recently completed a Medical Device Troubleshooting and Repair workshop, where they learned how to diagnose issues with common electronic medical devices and put together simple electrical circuitry to fix medical devices such as bili lamps and infant incubators. With these skills, a small group of students travelled to Antigua and Guatemala City, Guatemala to work at resident hospitals.
"If I could describe the experience in one way, it would be life changing," said Amy Hughes, a third year Biomedical Engineering student.
EWH ROC@RIT strives to bring the principles of their parent organization to life. They abide by their motto of being "all-inclusive, all-driven" and inspiring "RIT engineering for better worldwide health." The group is currently involved in EWH's Projects That Matter, and are focusing on building a stand-alone surgical lamp along with designing, prototyping and building an audiometer to test for hearing loss in patients. These two items are important in developing worlds, and if their designs are chosen as the winners of the contest, they will be developed in labs at Duke University.