Project News
The senior capstone design studio SEEDR has been advising this Spring has concluded with exciting results. The studio consisted of teams of mechanical engineering, industrial design and architecture students working on humanitarian design projects.
The project included a water acquisition and distribution for Nicaragua, a net-zero energy health care clinic for Tunisia, a net zero energy stand alone vaccine cold room for Tunisia, a vaccine cool box, a birthing kit for Papua New Guinea, and an immunization and well-being health care post kit for Papua New Guinea.
These teams went on to compete against thirty-six other teams in the Spring 2010 Mechanical Engineering Senior Capstone Design Expo at Georgia Tech, winning the top four honors in the process.
SEEDR would like to thank Dr. Colton and Sabir Khan for the opportunity to participate in what was an invigorating and enlightening experience. While SEEDR advised on multidisciplinary research and design methods and commercialization, SEEDR learned a great deal from the instructors, other advisors, and students alike.
The success and excitement surrounding the humanitarian and development-centered design studio is a promising sign for expanding the work across the Institute and SEEDR looks forward to participating again next term.
Also, SEEDR and its partners would like to wish the graduating seniors the best of luck in their careers as they continue to sharpen their skills for redesigning global development.
The final reports and presentations are available for download here.
SEEDR is invited by the Tennenbaum Institute at Georgia Tech to participate in a “Summer Project on Smart Grid.” Participants include graduate students from the School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Georgia Tech and Dr. William B. Rouse of the Tennenbaum Institute. The course will be hosted by the Tennenbaum Institute from May 17 through July 26.
The Smart Grid project will focus on consumer embrace of the Smart Grid including how to empower, enable, and motivate consumers to actively participate in the Smart Grid. The cost of such an initiative is enormous and the expected return on this investment is highly dependent on consumer acceptance of managing their own use of electricity and the technology and systems that enable electricity management. The course is also expected to consider the intelligent design of other utilities such as gas and water.
A recent report from Accenture entitled Understanding Consumer Preferences in Energy Efficiency surveyed more than 9,000 energy customers in seventeen countries that suggests there is considerable opposition to smart meters and other smart grid technologies promise to provide households with real-time data on their energy use and allow energy firms to reduce peak demand by automatically turning off non-essential appliances. Consumers simply do not trust the energy companies to commercialize their usage data. As understandable as this may seem, this presents tremendous opportunities for third-party providers to provide solutions.
“Consumer acceptance of the Smart Grid is centered on the cost of adopting new technologies; pervasiveness and user interface of those technologies; and consumer privacy and security,” said Donald Moreland, SEEDR Director. “Despite consumer skepticism, a tremendous opportunity exists for companies with emerging technologies and business models to bridge the gap between the consumer and industry.”
SEEDR’s work in Smart Grid includes the development of collaborative program initiatives that endorse open architecture, plug-and-play components, open standards, and promote interoperability. SEEDR brings together the philanthropy, business leaders, policy makers, and academia in a consortium of stakeholders to initiate small-scale Smart Grid pilot programs and assist in applying results to large-scale implementation. “This is a great opportunity for SEEDR to collaborate with the Tennenbaum Institute and talented graduate students from the top industrial and systems engineering program in the country.”
The following is reposted from Red Cedar Technology.
Red Cedar Technology to Help Reengineer Cold-Chain Containers
HEEDS optimization software used to design new generation of vaccine carriers to help eradicate disease
East Lansing, MI (March 29, 2010) – Atlanta-based firm, SEEDR L3C, recently received funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to improve reverse cold-chain vaccine transport containers. SEEDR, in partnership with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), has selected Red Cedar Technology’s design process and optimization software to reengineer the potentially life-saving containers.
“The Red Cedar Technology team and the HEEDS® platform enable us to organize and process exceptional complexity, and rapidly explore simulation data that will help expand our possibilities and drive our decision making,” explained SEEDR managing director, Michael Moreland.
Reverse cold-chain containers are used by countries and aid organizations to ensure that vaccines are maintained at the required temperature while they are transported to remote locations for immunization campaigns. The primary goal of this project is to redesign and custom engineer the reverse cold-chain containers to improve their performance, affordability, and environmental footprint.
Dr. Brent Burkholder, Director of the CDC Global Immunization Division, said he hopes the project can “protect the significant investment in costly vaccines, and, more importantly, to ensure the safety of those receiving immunizations.”
The new containers have the potential to strengthen immunization and disease surveillance programs by reducing vaccine and specimen loss. In addition, these lighter and less-expensive containers offer substantial cost-savings potential. With approximately 135 million children born in 2009, global immunization efforts cost billions of dollars. The CDC Global Immunization Division alone will spend $170 million on such efforts this year. “From polio to measles to the H1N1 virus, this technology has the potential to enhance efforts to track and help eradicate the world’s most-threatening diseases,” said Moreland.
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About Red Cedar Technology: Red Cedar Technology improves and accelerates the design process for companies facing complex engineering challenges. Our software and consulting services provide engineers with the expertise and technology to reduce product development time and significantly increase productivity during the design process. Product teams worldwide use our expertise to design safer cars, engineer life-saving cardiovascular stents, and develop innovative structures for air travel and space exploration, among many other groundbreaking applications. For more information, visit www.redcedartech.com.
Media Contact: JoAnne L. Bratten, Marketing and Communications Coordinator, Red Cedar Technology, (517) 664-1137, info@redcedartech.com.
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SEEDR presented “Bridging the Relevancy Gap: An innovation-design methodology for value engineering the redesign of vaccine cold chain transport containers” at the 2010 Conference on Health & Humanitarian Logistics.
SEEDR developed the work under its “Reengineering (Reverse) Cold Chain” initiative in partnership with the Global Immunization Division, US Centers for Disease Control & Prevention. Early in SEEDR’s research it became apparent that how the users packed, carried, and interacted with the product was an especially significant factor in determining the success or failure of the cold chain in immunization programs in developing countries.
Yet despite the importance of proper usage, these products lack of relevancy with end users. They can be difficult or ambiguous to use properly and seem not to resonate with the global set of users.
If new technology and product design were to be an effective way to reduce the chances and consequence of user error and overcome this gap, SEEDR would have to maximize the way in which it informed its design process. Overcoming the distance, cultural, and perceptual barriers to connect the design process to the end-user will help form the engineering and design parameters, ultimately driving the containers’ thermomechanical structure, materials composition, physical geometries, visual communications and user instructions, ergonomics and carrying methods.
The resulting design-strategy methodology has produced promising results thus far, “reveal[ing] previously uncontextualized behavioral patterns and failure points, connected the designers to a global sample of users, and facilitated user input and simulation and survey data to drive decision making.”
The relevancy gap between designers/manufacturers and the end users pervades many of the products upon which those in developing countries rely. SEEDR believes the methods developed could have potential in addressing the relevancy gap for other products important to health, development, and humanitarian logistics.
The work’s authors included Michael Moreland, SEEDR strategist and managing director, Victoria Gammino, epidemiologist with the Global Immunization Division, US Centers for Disease Control & Prevention, Sue Gerber, public health advisor with the Global Immunization Division, US Centers for Disease Control & Prevention, and Scott Wellman, SEEDR’s lead cold-chain engineer.
SEEDR’s partners at the Tennenbaum Institute also presented the work they have been doing under the SEEDR cold-chain initiative. Trustin Clear and William Rouse presented the methodology of the discrete event simulation (DES) model they have built to quantify the effects of transport equipment in the immunization cold chain.
The model simulates the relationships between specific cold chain equipment, the vaccine and ice they container carry, and the climatic conditions and duration of given nodes in the chain. With the ability to simulate the conditions and durations for any link in any chain, the model allows SEEDR to simulate any given combination of conditions the containers might encounter, including transport delays and unexpected temperature extremes. These simulations, run hundreds of thousands of times at every possible permutation, show the wherewithal and systemic consequences of different types of equipment under different conditions.
SEEDR can model the impact of various design decisions and, by placing the primary and higher-order benefits of improved cold chain containers in the context of these simulated environments and real-world scenarios, begin to assess the value created by equipment innovation in immunization programs.
The Georgia Tech’s Health & Humanitarian Logistics Center, a unit of the Supply Chain & Logistics Institute hosts the annual conference, now in its second year, at the Georgia Tech hotel in Tech Square in Atlanta, Georgia. This year’s conference featured speakers from US Department of Homeland Security, UN World Food Programme, Doctors Without Borders/Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF), US Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC), American Red Cross, US Africa Command (AFRICOM), Disaster Resilience Leadership Academy at Tulane University, United Parcel Service (UPS), CARE International, Clinton Foundation, and more.
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DOWNLOAD the “Bridging the Relevancy Gap” abstract.
DOWNLOAD the “Bridging the Relevancy Gap” poster.
SEEDR’s poster on display at the 2010 Conference on Health & Humanitarian Logistics.
ATLANTA – SEEDR L3C, an Atlanta-based solution and innovation design firm, has received a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to redesign and reengineer cold-chain containers used in global and domestic vaccine and disease-monitoring programs. SEEDR will partner with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Georgia Tech Tennenbaum Institute (TI) on this project.
Countries and multinational aid agencies rely on these containers to maintain vaccines at required temperatures as they are shipped and delivered to children around the world. They also use the containers to transport specimens or other biological products such as blood back from the field to laboratories for diagnosis and epidemiological surveillance.
“From polio to measles to the H1N1 virus, this technology has the potential to enhance efforts to locate and eradicate the world’s most-threatening diseases,” said SEEDR Managing Director Michael Moreland.
The redesigned containers will use applied science developed by SEEDR technology partner Global Tech International (GTI). GTI is the inventor of Powder Impression Molding (PIM) and Molecular Modification Technology (MMT), both of which have found success in automotive and aerospace industries and have applications for the cold-chain containers.
The new containers have the potential to strengthen immunization and disease surveillance programs by reducing vaccine and specimen loss. In addition, these lighter and less-expensive containers offer substantial cost-savings potential. With approximately 135 million children born in 2009, global immunization efforts cost billions of dollars. The CDC Global Immunization Division alone will spend $170 million on such efforts this year.
Dr. Brent Burkholder, Director of the CDC Global Immunization Division, said he hopes the project can “protect the significant investment in costly vaccines, and, more importantly, to ensure the safety of those receiving immunizations.”
The SEEDR-led project is a unique combination of expertise from government, private enterprise, academia and philanthropy. “This type of public-private partnership facilitates the application of the most cutting-edge technologies to difficult and sometimes intractable public health problems,” said Dr. Victoria Gammino, project co-investigator and CDC epidemiologist.
GTI’s containers are built with recycled materials. This is attractive to the CDC, which is focused on delivering vaccines – an energy and resource-intensive effort — with a smaller environmental impact. Sue Gerber, CDC co-investigator for the project, noted that, “we have the opportunity to improve vaccine delivery capacity while reducing the environmental impact of the cold chain.”
Tennenbaum, the global enterprise and innovation think tank at Georgia Tech, is building a simulation model to measure the potential impact the containers will have on the costs and effectiveness of the vaccines.
