Anna ~ BU ’18

We participated in a course at the American University of Beirut called Humanitarian Engineering: Designing Solutions for Health Challenges in Crises. This class represented an important overlap between engineering and public health.  It gave us the opportunity to go on field visits to refugee camps, develop needs assessments, and use our engineering skills to propose a solution to the identified need. Engineering isn’t just making a device. You can make the perfect device to solve any problem, but if it doesn’t adapt to the setting it’s being used in then it is useless.  It is important to look at engineering through a public health lens and to empathize with the end user of the technology.

For the project, my group focused on the problem of access to information for refugees. As we visited the camps, we found that people in different sites, or even different tents a couple of feet away from one another, knew disconnected information regarding health care services, educational services, and other general information that is available to them. This means that although there are services that are available to refugees, not all refugees know about them. To narrow down the focus, our group focused on access to information on vaccinations. Vaccinations are offered to refugee children for free, but not all refugees know this. Our proposed solution was a simple box with a recorded message that can be implemented in a refugee camp. This message can be updated by NGOs to convey information to anyone that walks up to it and presses a button. This device represented a simple use of technology that can be easily integrated into a refugee site.

Anna is pictured above visiting the “Our Lady of Lebanon” statue.

Anna is a 2018 graduate of Boston University’s biomedical engineering program.