The laboratory director of MIT Little Devices, José Gómez-Márquez gave a lecture exclusively for students of the Doctoral Program in Social Complexity, last December 4th.

His visit was part of the “Strategies for Developing Affordable Crowdsourced Sensing for Disease and Environmental Monitoring” project, aimed at creating low-cost sensors for medical and environmental applications. This initiative of the Faculty of Engineering of Universidad del Desarrollo and The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is supported by the research fund MISTI (awarded by CONICYT and the Secretariat for Economy), allowing the exchange of students and teachers from both institutions. “Our approach is to create laboratory sensors and devices not only for us to export to the communities, but to be develop them locally. That has helped us develop diagnoses of dengue, Ebola and other diseases in South America and Central America”.

“There is a range of health technologies that are designed with a user-centric engineering”, said José Gómez Márquez, who has specialized in designing devices that allow doctors and nurses in developing countries invent their own medical technologies. The expert is a TED Fellow, he also has advised governments in the areas of science and technology and has received two awards from the Lemelson MIT.

Jose Gomez-Marquez´s visit was possible thanks to Camilo Rodriguez-Beltran -Director of Innovation from the Faculty of Engineering of Universidad del Desarrollo- who has worked extensively with the researcher.