Susannah Fox talks about innovation and technology in healthcare #NationOfMakers #WeekofMaking @whitehouseostp
Susannah Fox, CTO of the US Department of Health and Human Services, has a great post on Medium about creating innovation in the health sector.
A big part of my role as the Chief Technology Officer at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is to create space for innovation.
I help run the HHS IDEA Lab, which was established in 2013 to improve how HHS delivers on its mission. Our strategy, in a nutshell, is to help our colleagues set audacious goals and then invite people to assist, from inside and outside of the federal government.
In alignment with this vision, we launched an initiative called Invent Health designed to empower inventors to create tools for better living and better clinical care. We are widening the definition of “technology” to include hardware, medical and assistive devices, because we believe that the democratization of design and manufacturing tools is going to follow the same path as we saw in the democratization of access to information and data.
For example:
The widespread popularity of 3D printers has created an opportunity for the production of custom-designed assistive devices like prosthetic hands and arms. E-NABLEis a network of volunteers who will take an order, for example, from someone who has lost their fingers or has a birth difference, but would like to be able to pick up an object. This peer-to-peer community shares open-source prototypes and publishes their design files in the public domain so that anyone can copy and improve on their ideas.
Read the full post here and check out our coverage of the National Week of Making here.
Adafruit publishes a wide range of writing and video content, including interviews and reporting on the maker market and the wider technology world. Our standards page is intended as a guide to best practices that Adafruit uses, as well as an outline of the ethical standards Adafruit aspires to. While Adafruit is not an independent journalistic institution, Adafruit strives to be a fair, informative, and positive voice within the community – check it out here: adafruit.com/editorialstandards
Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, TinyGO, or even use the Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for CircuitPython, MakeCode, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.
Have an amazing project to share? The Electronics Show and Tell is every Wednesday at 7pm ET! To join, head over to YouTube and check out the show’s live chat – we’ll post the link there.
