A doctor working in the Gaza strip has helped develop a 3D printed, 30 cent stethoscope that outperforms the market leader.

Tarek Loubani heads up the Glia project, designed to bring low cost medical devices to Gaza, where he has been working at the Shifa hospital for several years. The various iterations he has engineered, from a loom for weaving gauze to an ear inspecting otoscope, have already been published online, open source, at Github. The Register reports how the emergency doctor recently told the audience at the Chaos Communications Camp in Germany how during Israeli assaults in 2012, he and his fellow doctors were forced to hold their ears to victim's chests to listen to their heartbeat, because there were so few medical tools available. The experience spurred him on to launch Glia, and the stethoscope has already been trialled across hospitals for the past six months and is "as good as any stethoscope out there in the world". "We have the data to prove it," said Loubani.


Loubani self-funded the €10,000 cost of engineering the device, and is confident it will soon gain the approvals needed to be widely used. "We took an industry-standard setup [described here] and compared the standard stethoscope to various stethoscopes of our [own], finally settling on a design that beat the gold standard Littmann Cardiology III by 3M," he tells WIRED. "We are in the process of getting our Medical Device Establishment License (MDEL) from Health Canada."

The stethoscope plans are already online, with all the devices coming out of the Glia project totally open source -- because the plan is not to manufacture and sell these 30 cent stethoscopes, but for Gazans to build them.

"The goal here is self-sufficiency, and so the plan for Gaza and other underserved areas is to have 3D printers there," Loubani tells WIRED. "It would cost about as much for a 3D printer as to buy a new Littmann stethoscope." The ideal model, he says, is the RepRap Prusa i3 printer, which is already being used to build medical devices and prosthetics in Gaza.


Glia, as a project, is ambitious. Alongside the ear inspecting devices and looms are projects for a pulse oximeter and even an electrocardiogram. Loubani says it's perfectly possible to design low cost, 3D printed versions of these, because "we are not targeting the casual hobbyist at home... we are targeting hospitals and ministries of health, who have biomedical engineering departments." "The technology in the Pulse Ox is trivially simple for anybody with a high school-level knowledge of electronics: print, screen, etch, solder, test. I learned to assemble a pulse oximeter in an afternoon, and I could teach you to do the same even if you've never soldered before. "The main challenges to all of these are making devices that work, and providing scientifically proven ways to test and validate the devices."

Loubani is also behind a crowdfunding project to bring solar power to hospitals in Gaza. EmpowerGAZA, which raised its $200,000 Indiegogo target in June, seeks to help medical institutions in the Palestinian territory thrive despite the constant power cuts the region experiences. The money has been raised for four of the biggest hospitals in Gaza, which care for the more than 1.8 million people residing there. The idea is for the hospitals to be totally self-reliant, and remain open 24 hours a day for emergencies, operations and intensive care cases. "The United Nations Development Programme is now coordinating with the various stakeholders to ensure a successful deployment," Loubani says of the project. "The next step is to engineer the system that will be used; then to request permission from the Israelis to import solar panels and batteries (both are currently banned); then to bring in the materials; then to build out; then to test."