About the project
There are currently gross disparities in access to safe, essential surgical care worldwide. The global burden of disease amenable to surgical interventions such as trauma, cancer and complications from childbirth is significant and growing. Injuries cause 5.7 million deaths yearly, much more than the 3.8 million deaths caused by malaria, HIV/Aids and tuberculosis together. For widespread implementation safe and high quality affordable equipment is needed that is appropriate for usage in challenging environments. Electro surgery devices are used in the majority of surgeries in the developing world, but is also one of the most complex and burdensome devices. To overcome some of the problems of the electro surgery devices and make it appropriate for the use in challenging environment it has to be re-designed. The design has to encounter the local needs, able to deal with the lack of maintenance infrastructure, limited resources of energy and water and needs to be cleaned easily.

Your responsibilities
Topics may address investigation of the local environment in low resource countries, development of requirements for the context specific design or the development of a prototype. Your responsibility includes but is not limited to review state of the art literature on electro surgery devices and the design of context specific design for low resource settings. But may also include research in a developing country or getting in contact with relevant NGO’s that are working in the same field.  The Delft Global initiative is a collaboration partner in this project and offers lectures and workshop related to the field of research in low resource settings which you can attend for free.

Your profile
We are looking for a motivated individual for an internship or master thesis. You are a master level student in Engineering (Biomedical, Electrical), Technical medicine, Physics or Industrial design. To be successful, we need you to have affinity/interest in with:

-        Research in developing countries

-        Multidisciplinary research

-        Design/Solid works

-        Have systematic and thorough way of working

-        Have good communication skills

-        Take responsibilities and act on these

-        Be enthusiastic, focused and have a result-driven mind-set