S1E80 - Glia on 3D Printing Medical Devices

Episode Summary

This week on Live Like the World is Dying, Inmn is joined by Carrie and Korin from the Glia project to talk about some of their projects and specifically to talk about why 3D-printed medical devices are really cool and how they help get medical devices to places where they are not otherwise easily accessible. They talk about Glia's work on 3D-printed tourniquets, stethoscopes, otoscopes, and dialysis machines. Also, please give them $5 million. You won't regret it.

Host Info

Inmn can be found on Instagram @shadowtail.artificery.

Guest Info

Glia can be found at www.glia.org or on Twitter @Glia_Intl

Publisher Info

This show is published by Strangers in A Tangled Wilderness. We can be found at www.tangledwilderness.org, or on Twitter @TangledWild and Instagram @Tangled_Wilderness. You can support the show on Patreon at www.patreon.com/strangersinatangledwilderness.

Transcript

Glia on 3D Printing Medical Devices

Inmn 00:15 Hello, and welcome to live Like the World is Dying, your podcast for what feels like the end times. I'm your host Inmn Neruin. And this week we're going to be talking with Glia, a rad organization that designs 3D printed medical devices so that no matter where you are, you can access basic and quality medical devices. But first, this podcast is a proud member of the Channel Zero Network of anarchists podcasts. And here's a jingle from another show on the network. Doo doo doo doo doo. [Singing a simple melody]

Inmn 01:17 And we're back. Thanks so much, y'all, for coming on the podcast today. Would y'all like to introduce yourselves with your name, pronouns, nd what you what you're here to talk about or what your role is in Glia.

Carrie 01:45 Okay, I'll go first. My name is Carrie Wakem and she/her and my role at Glia is executive director. It sounds very flashy. It's not. We're all team players here at Glia.

Korin 02:00 My name is Korin, my pronouns are she and they. I'm a volunteer with the Glia project, particularly focused on the tourniquets, and specifically with regards to manufacturing instructions and quality control documentation.

Inmn 02:13 Cool. And would you want to kind of introduce what Glia is?

Carrie 02:20 Absolutely. So Glia is a medical device manufacturing company. We do lots of research and we build and research devices that are considered high quality, open source, and at cost. And that's sort of the stuff that we do.

Inmn 02:42 How did Glia come to get started? Also, does Glia stand for anything? Is it an acronym? Or is it just a fun word?

Carrie 02:50 Everybody asks that question about the acronym and how we became Glia or where the name came from and really there's no interesting story behind it. I think the original team on the Glia project just basically said, "What should we call this?" Somebody throw it the name Glia. And then it stuck as far as I know. But that was before my time. I can absolutely speak to a bit of the history of Glia and how it came to be. So, our founder Tarek Loubani is in emergency medicine physician in London, Ontario in Canada. And he works frequently in the Gaza Strip. And quite a few years ago he was there during the war and he was responding to a large amount of casualties. And he was in a room with a whole bunch of patients that needed to be seen. And when he looked around, he saw that there were only two stethoscopes being used in that room and one of them was around his own neck. And literally people had blood on their ears because they were putting their ear to the chest of patients to hear if there were heartbeats. And it occurred to him that some other places in the world don't have access to even basic medical tools like stethoscopes. And then after that trip, he was home and he was playing with one of his nephews and he was using the little toy plastic stethoscope doctor kit--I think Fisher Price used to make one when I was a kid. Anyway, that's who made one. I'm sure there's a lot of knock offs now. But, they have a little toy stethoscope. And he put it to his ears and he was listening and he was like, "This thing actually works. You can actually hear a heartbeat through this plastic toy." And he just had an interest in 3D printing at the time and he thought to himself, "I wonder if I could create a stethoscope using a 3d printer that would be more accessible, lower cost, and hopefully as high a quality as the Littmann cardiology iii, which is what our stethoscope now compares to. So Glia does have a 3D printed stethoscope today. It was our first product that was developed and it's based off of that experience of our founder.

Inmn 05:00 Cool. Is that is that...[incoherent starting and stopping and stuttering] That makes sense how that would prompt an organization like Glia. But it is...That's really grim that that is how these organizations start.

Carrie 05:15 Yeah. Unfortunately. Though, those are the stories that probably motivate people to do something about these scenarios, right? So, you see a problem and you want to solve it

Inmn 05:27 Is Glia, like, I guess....So from there, this person started 3D printing stethoscopes and then how did the larger structure of Glia kind of start from there? Was it like people just being like, "Oh, that's really cool. Could we also make this other thing?" or?

Carrie 05:43 Um, yeah, so a lot of what we've done...There's parts of it that's have been strategic and parts of our projects that have been organic. The first stethoscope, I believe, was developed in 2014. I didn't come into the project full time myself until 2017. So this is a little bit before my time. Stethoscopes were the thing that we were sort of working on, at the moment that I joined Glia myself. And we started with the stethoscope specifically because it's an iconic device, right? Like everybody recognizes it. So, there was some strategy into picking a device to get started on the topic of "How can an open source stethoscope really changed the world? How can that provide better access to quality health care?" It's a talking point and it still is to this day. From there, though, it was the experiences of the people that were working or associated with the project--collaborators, we've had a lot of collaborators, a lot of volunteers over the years--that sort of drove the direction of some of these projects. And the one that Korin mentioned at the beginning when she introduced herself was the tourniquet project. And that was actually originally developed by the engineers that were working for Glia back in 2017, a group there. And they saw a need for tourniquets in the Gaza Strip. They just couldn't access this type of device. And as we know in Gaza, there's constantly the threat of war. So, they needed to be able to come up with something that they could get access to. And so they designed this tourniquet--and we can probably get into that a little bit later--but that was something that organically happened from our remote office. Other projects like our otoscope. We have a 3d printed otoscope. This project was literally designed by a guy that was a