uChek uses the iPhone’s camera to capture the color changes in commercially available urine dipsticks. Results of the test can be stored, emailed and analyzed over time.

It may not be glamorous, but it’s true – each year, urinary tract infections lead to more than 9 million doctor visits in the United States alone. But the infection can now be tested for through an iPhone app — uChek — developed by TEDFellow Myshkin Ingawale. This app could also be an effective tool for diabetics whose doctors have recommended regular urine analysis, and for the monitoring of bladder, liver and kidney disorders. It could also be a powerful tool for healthcare professionals in the developing world who hope to bring testing to patients wherever they are, instead of the other way around.

Ingawale, who previously created the noninvasive anemia diagnosis tool ToucHb, has just released the app, which was demoed at TED2013. But there have been adjustments made since.

“Early prototypes like the one demoed at TED 2013 were ‘work in process’ and were susceptible to certain ambient light changes and movement errors, and when checked against a conventional laboratory urinalyser it showed lower accuracy,” Ingawale says in a Q&A with the TED Fellows blog. “We made some design changes in the system — most notably, the introduction of our patent-pending ‘cuboid’ — a foldable, reusable stand for the iPhone, which improved the accuracy of the new system, making it comparable with a laboratory urinalyser.”

Ingawale explains that the changes were needed to move uChek from being considered a “wellness tool” to being a “medical device.”

Next up for Ingwale — expanding uChek to Android and other platforms. And, of course, coming up with new ideas for medical apps. “This is our first really big initiative in the world of apps,” he says. “We are looking forward to seeing where this road leads.”

Julian Treasure takes the stage at TEDGlobal 2009, sharing the shocking fact that — when you can hear others talking in an open office — productivity dips by 66%.

Julian Treasure cares very deeply for your ears. That’s why he’s given TED talks like “The 4 ways sound affects us” and “Why architects need to use their ears.” Treasure is on a mission to make policymakers, engineers, architects and, well, Julian Treasure: Shh! Sound health in 8 stepseveryone think more about what they hear around them — because the way things sound have a tangible, measurable effect on how we feel, how we heal, how we work and how we live.

To this end, Treasure’s The Sound Agency has teamed up with Biamp Systems to create a whitepaper called “Building in Sound,” a look at the data linking sound and well-being.

“This paper is based on exhaustive review of academic papers, and reports from national governments and multinational bodies, going back some 40 years,” it begins. “The research examines the causes and impacts of sound on our health, recovery from illness or surgery, our ability to absorb information and learn, our productivity, and general sense of wellbeing.”

Read the paper in full, or check out some of the most fascinating facts below.

1. The estimated cost of noise pollution is $30.8 billion a year — and that’s just in Europe.  The World Health Organization Europe’s 2011 report, “Burden of disease from environmental noise,” analyzes the relationship between environmental noise and health. In this study, they calculate the financial cost of lost work days, healthcare treatment, impaired learning and decreased productivity due to noise. The total they came up with is staggering, considering they’re looking at just one continent.
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2. Each year, noise pollution takes a day off the life of every adult and child in Europe. This same study also looked at the cost of noise pollution in terms of lost life expectancy. Shockingly, they determined that every 365 days, one million years are taken off European’s collective life expectancy — averaging to a day per person.
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3. If you can hear someone talking while you’re reading or writing, your productivity dips by up to 66%.  Open floor-plan offices distract workers without them even noticing it. In a classic study published in the British Journal of Psychology in 1998, researchers found that employers were highly distracted when they could hear conversation around them, and less able to perform their duties. Another classic study found that noise in the office also correlated to increased stress hormone levels and a lower willingness to engage with others. According to Sound Agency case study, when sound masking technology was used in an office, there was a 46% improvement in employees’ ability to concentrate and their short term memory accuracy increased 10 percent.
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4. The average noise level in many classrooms is not just associated with impaired learning — but with permanent hearing loss. Noise can deeply affect learning too. The WHO recommends a noise level in classrooms akin to that you’d find in a library — 35 decibels. However, a study in Germany found that the actual average noise volume in classrooms is 65 decibels — a level associated with permanent hearing loss. As Treasure outlines in this talk, for a student sitting in the fourth row of a traditional classroom, speech intelligibility is just 50 percent — meaning that they only hear half of what their teacher says.
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5. A 20 decibel increase in aircraft noise is enough to delay a student’s reading level by up to 8 months. A study published in the American Journal of Epidemiology in 2006 looked at 2000 students between the ages of 9 and 10 in schools in The Netherlands, Spain and the U.K. — many in schools near airports. They found that aircraft noise was associated with impaired reading comprehension.
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6. 50% of teachers have experienced damage to their voice from talking over classroom noise. A study of teachers published in the Journal of Speech, Language and Hearing Research in 2004, noted another side-effect of noise pollution in classrooms — 50% of teachers have suffered irreversible damage to their voices. Why? Because as the environment gets noisier, we speak more loudly.
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7. The average noise level in some hospital wards not only impedes healing — but could legally require hearing protection. The WHO recommends noise levels in hospital wards to stay around 35 decibels. But a study in the US found the average noise level in hospital wards is actually closer to 95 decibels — just 10 decibels beyond the noise level at which U.S. federal law requires ear protection for prolonged exposure. Sleep is crucial for patient recovery, and yet with the constant beeps, tones and shuffling, the body feels that it is under threat. Not to mention that staff errors increase the greater the level of distracting noise.
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8. 3% of cardiac arrest cases in Germany have been explicitly linked to traffic noise. Treasure found this alarming fact in a 2009 press release from the Environmental Protection UK.
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9. Noise pollution may possibly even contribute to crime. When the city of Lancaster, California, installed a sound system featuring birdsong along a half-mile stretch of a main road, there was a 15 percent reduction in reported crime, according to an article in The Wall Street Journal. Similarly, when the London Underground started playing classical music at a crime-heavy station, robberies fell by 33% while assaults on staff dropped 25%, says The Independent.

Below, an infographic further outlining the problem.

A look at the crystallites of AZT, the first antiviral approved for the treatment of HIV/AIDS. Originally, AZT was created to treat cancer — but it failed in tests.

When you pop a pill, do you know how it works? Most modern drugs target specific molecules, interacting with disease at the molecular level. But while we know the molecular causes of roughly 4,000 diseases, a very slim 6 percent of those diseases have a safe and effective drug to treat them. Why? Because of the incredible difficulty and cost of finding a compound that is perfectly shaped to interact with a molecular cause, and that also happens to be safe.

Francis Collins, the Director of the National Institutes of Health, wants to help this process along. Francis Collins: We need better drugs -- nowIn yesterday’s talk, given at TEDMED 2012, Collins makes a bold case for translational research to produce better drugs, faster. What does “translational” mean? It means research that takes a particular look at basic scientific discoveries and asks: how can we make an actual medicine from this? To that end he helped launch the NIH’s National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences in 2011. NCATS aims to do away with the costly and time-consuming bottlenecks that prevent new drugs from coming to market.

Collins hopes to encourage pharmaceutical companies to open up their stashes of drugs that have already passed safety tests, but that failed to successfully treat their targeted disease. He also wants to look at how drugs approved for one disease could successfully treat another. We can teach “old drugs new tricks,” Collins says in his talk, by matching them to the molecular pathways of other diseases.

Doing so will require academia, the pharmaceutical industry, government agencies and patient advocacy groups to work together, in conjunction with talented researchers and ample funding. After all, a single drug can cost billions to develop. Still, it’s possible.

In his talk, Dr. Collins mentions two failed cancer drugs that were successfully repurposed: zidovudine (AZT), the first antiviral approved for HIV/AIDS in 1987 and, more recently, farnesyltransferase inhibitor (FTI), which was used to successfully treat children with the rapid-aging disease Progeria in a 2012 clinical trial.

Fascinated, we asked Collins to share more. Below, read his list of seven drugs that have been repurposed. Of them he writes via email, “None of these drugs could have been developed without collaborations between drug developers and researchers with new ideas about applications, based on molecular insights about disease.”

1. Raloxifene: The FDA approved Raloxifene to reduce the risk of invasive breast cancer in postmenopausal women in 2007. It was initially developed to treat osteoporosis.
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2. Thalidomide: This drug started out as a sedative in the late fifties, and soon doctors were infamously prescribing it to prevent nausea in pregnant women. It later caused thousands of severe birth defects, most notably phocomelia, which results in malformed arms and legs. In 1998, thalidomide found a new use as a treatment for leprosy and in 2006 it was approved for multiple myeloma, a bone marrow cancer.
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3. Tamoxifen: This hormone therapy treats metastatic breast cancers, or those that have spread to other parts of the body, in both women and men, and it was originally approved in 1977. Thirty years later, researchers discovered that it also helps people with bipolar disorder by blocking the enzyme PKC, which goes into overdrive during the manic phase of the disorder.
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4. Rapamycin: This antibiotic, also called sirolimus, was first discovered in bacteria-laced soil from Easter Island in the seventies, and the FDA approved it in 1999 to prevent organ transplant rejection. Since then, researchers have found it effective in treating not one but two diseases: Autoimmune Lymphoproliferative Syndrome (ALPS), in which the body produces too many immune cells called lymphocytes, and lymphangioleiomyomatosis, a rare lung disease.
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5. Lomitapide: Intended to lower cholesterol and triglycerides, the FDA approved this drug to treat a rare genetic disorder that causes severe cholesterol problems called homozygous familial hypercholesterolemia last December.
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6. Pentostatin: This drug was created as a chemotherapy for specific types of leukemia. It was tested first in T-cell-related leukemias, which didn’t respond to the drug. But later NIH’s National Cancer Institute discovered that the drug was successful in treating a rare leukemia that is B-cell related, called Hairy Cell Leukemia.
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7. Sodium nitrite: This salt was first developed as an antidote to cyanide poisoning and, unrelated to medicine, it’s also used to cure meat. The National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute is currently recruiting participants for a sodium nitrite clinical trial, in which the drug will be tested as a treatment for the chronic leg ulcers associated with sickle cell and other blood disorders.

Interested in more thoughts on how we can change the long, clunky process of testing pharmaceuticals? Watch these 5 TED Talks with fascinating ideas for medical research »

Photo: Jerod Harris

Today’s talk, “Francis Collins: We need better drugs—now,” comes from TEDMEDFrancis Collins: We need better drugs -- now—our partner conference which gives doctors, surgeons, healthcare experts, medical researchers and people with a passion for health a place to share ideas worth spreading. Both TED and TEDMED were started by Richard Saul Wurman, and while TEDMED is now independently organized by Jay Walker (see his talk “Library of the imagination”) and his team, our content partnership lets us share great TEDMED talks with the worldwide TED.com audience.

TEDMED 2013 will take place April 16 through 19 in Washington, D.C. Learn more about about attending here »

Can’t be there in person? Host a free simulcast of the event at your university, teaching hospital, non-profit or government institution. Learn more about watching live »

To get you in the spirit for this amazing event, here some powerful TEDMED talks from years past.

1. David Blaine: How I held my breath for 17 minutes
2. Ben Goldacre: What doctors don’t know about the drugs they prescribe
3. E.O Wilson: Advice to your scientists
4. Ivan Oransky: Are we over-medicalized?
5. Ed Gavagan: A story about knots and surgeons
6. Eric Topol: The wireless future of medicine
7. A.J. Jacobs: How healthy living nearly killed me
8. Charles Limb: Building the musical muscle
9. Bill Doyle: Treating cancer with electric fields
10. Charity Tillemann-Dick: Singing after a double lung transplant

And see more talks from past TEDMEDs »

By Courtney E. Martin & John Cary

Pregnancy is supposed to be about life. And yet, every day, 800 women across the globe die from preventable causes related to pregnancy and childbirth. In Malawi, which has one of the worst maternal mortality rates in the world, a shocking 1 in 36 pregnant women die rather than become proud mothers.

But could this oversized problem be tackled through design? Malawi’s new president, Joyce Banda, certainly believes so.

More and more, global health experts are teaming up with designers to tackle daunting challenges like food scarcity, water contamination and, yes, maternal mortality — be they environmental, product, or systems design challenges. David Kelley on human-centered design Using what IDEO.org calls “human-centered design” — essentially putting the user at the center of a deeply iterative process — some of the most cutting-edge thinkers in public health are seeing old problems in new ways. Design is no longer just a tool of the global elite; it’s increasingly becoming a lever for the poorest, most vulnerable people in the world.

Two activists with a deep-seated interest in how design can transform lives, we spent the first two weeks of the year doing fieldwork in Malawi. Despite the fact that it is considered one of the world’s least-developed countries, leaders in Malawi are looking to dignifying design. Banda, who came into office in April after her predecessor passed away, has pledged her precious time in office to emulating places like Rwanda, where human-centered design has improved the lot of many rural poor. Banda faces her first official election on May 19, 2014, giving added urgency to her efforts.

The Aspen Institute’s Global Leadership Council on Reproductive Health coordinated our visit to the country, and is also marshaling resources and support Banda’s way. She is the second female president in Africa, following in the footsteps of Liberian Nobel Peace Prize winner, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf. (Watch Sirleaf’s Q&A on the TEDWomen stage in 2010.) The two are allies and perhaps symbols of a new dawn of women’s leadership on a continent that has long suffered from the corruption and violence.

One of Banda’s first acts in office was to double-down on a Presidential Initiative on Maternal Health & Safe Motherhood, focused on reducing maternal mortality from its current rate to 115 or less per 100,000 live births. She aims to do this by 2015.

Above, Michael Rosenblatt asks “How can we stop death during childbirth?” at TEDMed 2011.

One idea to this end: getting more women to give birth in clinics staffed with health providers and equipped to handle complications. In countries like Malawi, women have historically given birth in their homes with traditional birth attendants. This can be extremely dangerous. Should something go wrong, most traditional birth attendants aren’t trained to respond; many are also known to encourage women to push too fast, one cause of the scourge of fistula in the country.

So what is a country to do when 85% of its population, including women of child-bearing age, live in rural settings far afield of the few equipped clinics and hospitals in the country? It’s a question ripe for a design approach. The Malawian government has pledged to build as many as 150 “maternal waiting homes” near clinics where rural women can stay in advance of their due dates. One waiting home is already in service in Northern Malawi and seven more are currently under construction.

Jane Chen: A warm embrace that saves lives

Blueprints for these brick and concrete structures were developed by the Ministry of Health, taking two forms — a 24-bed version and a slightly larger 32-bed structure. Each is projected to cost between $70,000-$80,000, and will be funded by Malawi’s private sector and outside philanthropic support. These waiting homes have the opportunity to become beacons of hope in a country caught between natural beauty and devastating poverty.

But it’s not just bricks-and-mortar that Banda is using to change women’s lives; it’s also a human-centered design for the healthcare system — too long understaffed and disproportionately urban. The Presidential Initiative on Maternal Health & Safe Motherhood, for example, is already training tribal chiefs in the importance of clinic birth for rural women, recognizing that their influence will largely determine what kinds of healthcare options women feel compelled to access. Once the chiefs have encouraged women to get to clinics, they will be met by new community midwives (Banda aims to train over 1,000 by 2014) and training opportunities at the “waiting homes.” Indeed, the Malawian women we interviewed expressed that they would love to gain new skills and knowledge while they wait for their babies to arrive.

Resource-limited settings, like the rural villages of Malawi, seem like unusual places to find this kind of systemic and environmental design. But there are important precedents. For example, the breathtaking Butaro Hospital in Rwanda, designed by MASS Design Group and operated in January 2011 by Partners in Health (PIH).

Above, Marika Shioiri-Clark talks “Empathic Architecture” at TEDxStellenbosch, describing Butaro Hospital.

Perched on a hilltop once home to a military base, the Butaro Hospital proves that “if it can happen here, it can happen anywhere,” as Dr. Paul Farmer of PIH is known to say. Farmer is referring to the fact that this world-class hospital is found in a setting where there was no basic electricity until the advent of the hospital. But Farmer is also referring to a unique design imagined by professionals embedded in the community they sought to serve — rural villagers, doctors, and nurses. Further, the hospital was built by local community members using primarily local materials. Thousand of people were employed in making the facility’s exquisite lava rock walls, virtually all of them gaining new skills that may improve their livelihood in the future.

Many details at the Butaro Hospital tell a story about the ways that humans really heal. Rather than being a fortress of internal hallways and small, secluded rooms, like so many American hospitals, it is characterized by open-air external walkways and big, collective spaces with beds directly facing bright windows with beautiful views. Ernest Madu on world-class health care There are also countless places to gather and sit outside — including a beloved koi pond. Color-coded signage paired with the color of wards is bright and easy to understand for potentially anxious visitors, unlike the bureaucracy and bad lighting one finds too often in stateside clinics.

If all goes well, Malawi, like Rwanda before it, will have the potential to teach the so-called developed world something about dignifying design. It’s what many cutting-edge development and design experts are calling South-to-North strategies — where Western countries look to the Global South for the next, big innovations. It’s a refreshing reversal of fortune and a huge opportunity. Not just for the mothers of Malawi, but for all of us.

Courtney E. Martin is the author multiple books, including Do It Anyway: The New Generation of Activists. John Cary is an architect, author, and the founding editor of PublicInterestDesign.org. Together, they traveled to Malawi and Rwanda this month with a delegation from The Aspen Institute’s Global Health & Development program. They are also members of the TED Prize team and co-leads of The City 2.0, the 2012 TED Prize focused on the future of cities.

Top of page: A mother and baby in a sunny ward at Butaro Hospital. Here: Mothers and children await care at health clinic in the Doa district of Malawi. Photos: John Cary

It’s voting day in the United States. As Americans line up at the polls to vote for Barack Obama or Mitt Romney, eyes around the world are fixed on the contest, which predictions say will come down to a few key issues. So what has mattered most to Americans in this election? The TED Blog read this Gallup poll, which reveals the issues citizens want the next president to prioritize. Since these topics are ones speakers often address on the TED stage, for the past two months, we’ve brought you a series of playlists focusing on the top-rated issues. Today, the final installment.

It’s no surprise that “making healthcare available and affordable” is an issue Americans examined closely this election. 74 percent of US citizens surveyed indicated that healthcare was either “extremely important” or “very important” to them as they decided who to vote for. While some believe that healthcare reform can benefit us all exponentially, others say it’s far too complex and costly an institution to change. While the breadth of this issue can only begin to be scratched, the following 9 TED Talks provide a range of big ideas on improving corners of our health systems. (Also, check out the essay “Who’s really serious about fixing healthcare?,” part of our first-ever TEDWeekends on the Huffington Post.)

Daniel Kraft: Medicine’s future? There’s an app for that
If the scientific method is all about theoretical deduction and experimentation, then according to this healthcare professional, we’re not effectively using health data to accelerate innovation. In this talk from TEDxMaastricht, Daniel Kraft shows that by linking advanced technologies, great young minds and social media together we can develop mobile apps that will recognize global health insufficiencies and create portable, personal solutions based on aggregated data.

Jamie Heywood: The big idea my brother inspired
After Jamie Heywood’s brother Steven — a 29-year-old father — was diagnosed with ALS, his family embarked on a long journey toward approaching healthcare in a positive way. At TEDMed 2009, Heywood shares how he created Patients Like Me, a website that provides tools for patients so that they can track their own health status. The idea is that, with better information, a patient can engage with their doctor and influence their treatment.

Jack Andraka: Detecting pancreatic cancer … at 15
Pancreatic cancer is extremely fatal because, once it is detected, it has generally spread throughout the body. During the TED Talent Search, 15-year-old Jack Andraka shared an early detection system that he is currently developing. By studying a protein that can be spotted at an early stage of pancreatic cancer, Andraka is creating a minimally invasive test that could raise the survival rate from 5.5% to over 50%.

Rebecca Onie: What if our healthcare system kept us healthy?
In 1995, Rebecca Onie was an energetic law school student looking to make a difference in the lives of her low-income clients, many of whom had medical issues. Soon, she noticed a distinct correlation between the limited time doctors spent getting to know their patients and the larger societal problems perpetuating their poor living conditions. Thus, Health Leads was born to promote a health care system, rather than a “sick care system.” At TEDMed 2012, Onie shows how prescribing basic resources can keep patients healthy.

Lucien Engelen: Crowdsource your health
Lucien Engelen did not like the fact that you could use your smart phone to find the best Chinese food in the vicinity, but couldn’t use it to locate a defibrillator. In this talk from TEDxMaastricht, Engelen shows how encouraging patients to share information can save lives. With the development of a crowdsourced worldwide AED tracking website, citizens can keep track of where they’re finding defibrillators, and companies can validate their existence in order to save lives in a flash.

Max Little: A test for Parkinson’s with a phone call
There 6.3 million people worldwide living with Parkinson’s disease. Max Little’s visionary idea takes diagnosing the disease from a high-cost neurological test to an intimate moment in the hands of the patient. At TEDGlobal 2012, Little showed how a 30-second phone call — coupled with precise voice analysis software — could be all that’s needed for a diagnosis through the Parkinson’s Voice Initiative.

William Li: Can we eat to starve cancer?
Have you heard about the angiogenesis revolution? Well, understanding angiogenesis — the process by which your body grows new blood vessels — can help us not only prevent cancer, but keep it in remission. In this talk from TED2010, William Li addresses a hypothetically life-changing approach to treating and preventing cancer.

Alexander Grey: My muscle-measuring machine
Alexander Grey paid tribute to his father’s medical legacy by founding Somaxis, a start-up challenging the medical field with kinesthetic innovations. Somaxis developed affordable sensors that measure muscle energy, allowing you to predict injuries and preserve energy for optimum performance. With this innovation, people might some day be able to see back pain coming from their chair at work, or embark on a foot race with athletes overseas.

Jay Bradner: Open-source cancer research
Jay Bradner moved to Boston 10 years ago to discover how chemistry could effectively treat and kill cancer. While doing research on a rare cancer and its untargetable protein, his lab found a way to trick cancer into developing into a normal cell. By employing the eagerness of citizens, Bradner and his team hope to open-source their chemical findings. As he revealed at TEDxBoston, they hope to take pharmaceutical companies by storm and find the effective solutions themselves.

In the late 1800s, Cuban physician Carlos Finlay had a theory that yellow fever was spread by mosquitos — rather than by dirty clothing, as was the belief of the day. To test his theory, he asked living, breathing human beings to be voluntarily infected with the disease. It was devastating, potentially fatal work. And yet people signed on to be a part of the research. It’s believed to be one of the first times that subjects in medical experiments were given “informed consent,” a document laying out the risks in order to give test subjects the full picture of what they were getting themselves into.

“Informed consent is an idea we should be very proud of as a society — it’s something that separates us from the Nazis at Nuremberg,” says John Wilbanks in this powerful talk from TEDGlobal. “It’s the idea that agreement to join a study without understanding isn’t agreement.”

Rules about informed consent were codified starting after World War II, says Wilbanks, and strict limits were placed on how data could be gathered and used. Under current rules and laws, a situation such as that described in The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks would not take place, nor could the notorious Guatemala experiments of the 1940s.

But that said: A lot has changed since the late 1940s. Medical research is no longer limited to experiments that take a small group of individuals and test how a specific pharmaceutical affects them. Today, we recognize that our genomes, environments and choices all play into the overall health equation. And Wilbanks worries that, in this age where data on all these factors could be made widely available, our laws about medical privacy are delaying new treatments.

As Wilbanks says, “The way we gain informed consent — this tool that was created to protect us from harm — now creates silos. The data we collect for prostate cancer or Alzheimer’s trials goes into silos where it can only be used for prostate cancer or Alzheimer’s. It can’t be networked, it can’t be integrated … We cannot take the information from past trials and put them together to form statistically significant samples.”

Wilbanks imagines a different reality for our data — a commons that pools our medical records, genotypes and environmental factors. He is working to build a mine-able database through the website WeConsent.us, which allows anyone over the age of 14 to contribute their medical information and make it available to researchers. The idea: to allow them to see patterns that might not be visible with smaller sample sizes.

“I live in a web world where, when you share things, beautiful things happen,” says Wilbanks. “At least some of us really like to share as a form of control.”

To hear more about why forming a medical commons is so important, listen to Wilbank’s wonderful talk. And if you’re wondering how you can contribute to this project, read below for Wilbank’s suggestions.

Here, Wilbanks’ five suggestions for those who want to be impatient patients:

1. Learn about your data. You can get data about yourself amazingly easily now: your genotype, your electronic medical record, your lab results, your prescription information, your activity levels. Engage your doctor in a conversation about your data. Who’s gathering it? Where does it go? Why does it move the way it moves? Can you get a copy of it? Can you get a copy that is computationally useful — in other words, not a fax? In many cases, people have a legal right to copies of their medical records and other health information. So don’t be afraid to ask for it.

2. Generate your own data. If you’re really interested or motivated, it’s increasingly possible to commission your own data directly from your own samples. Companies like 23andMe.com will help you with your genotyping, and companies like Science Exchange can help you find providers who run more complex analysis.

3. Change your role from passive to active. Being “patient” is all about waiting — waiting for your doctor to see you, waiting for your pharmacist to fill a bottle. But you can be impatient. If you have cancer, you can get on the Association of Cancer Online Resources mailing list, or get in touch with Cancer Commons. You can enroll in a clinical study like the Athena Breast Health Network, or sign up with a patient-centric research organization like the Dr. Susan Love Research Foundation Army of Women, or get seriously deep into your genome at the Personal Genome Project.

4. Learn about the reality of identity and data. Be skeptical of promises of strong anonymity that also promise strong research. We can remove identifiers from your data, but as more and more data about you go online, it’s more and more possible to reverse-engineer and rediscover your identity. And one of the things that works best to create really anonymous data — introducing noise into the data, or false data — actively undercuts the scientific utility of the data. So if you’re going to get into this, understand that there are risks, and that many of those risks are poorly understood. This is a brave new world we’re entering.

5. Become a data donor. Go through the Portable Legal Consent process and donate your data to research. Because it’s only if we can create a large enough pool of impatient citizens, who understand the individual risks and still want to share their data, that we will accelerate the rate at which new technologies actually improve our health.

To hear more from Wilbanks, read his blog at Del-fi.org. He will be posting attribution for his TEDTalk slides there, as well as sharing a little bit about the experience of speaking at TED.

Designer Timothy Prestero loves a flashy concept car. But he would much rather create objects that will actually be of use to real people.

In an illuminating talk given at TEDxBoston, Timothy describes how he became interested in the problem of neonatal mortality upon hearing that 4 million babies die within 28 days of birth, especially in developing countries, often because of a lack of consistent heat. Thus, Timothy and his team designed the NeoNurture “car parts” infant incubator, a space-age looking device that landed in the pages of Time magazine as one of the “50 Best Inventions of 2010.”

Only, the design went nowhere from there.

Timothy and his team tried again, joining forces this time with manufacturers and hospital directors in developing countries, to tackle the problem of newborn jaundice, which is easily treated by bathing a baby in blue light. This time, Timothy thought about all the ways nurses in an overcrowded facility could use the device incorrectly by trying to treat more than one baby at a time, as well as how parents could accidentally undermine treatment by placing a blanket over their baby. This time, Timothy set to design a product that was hard to use the wrong way.

“There’s no such thing as a dumb user; there are only dumb products,” says Timothy. “Are we designing for the world that we want, are we designing for the world we have, or are we designing for the that’s coming, whether we’re ready or not?”

Timothy will probably be glad to hear about these four other designers, who are also working hard to create products to save the lives of newborns around the world.

A sleeping bag that saves lives
TED Fellow Jane Chen was also horrified by statistics on the number of premature babies who die, or grow up with severe health problems, because they cannot regulate their body temperature after birth. In this moving talk given at TEDIndia 2009, Jane reveals a $25 portable, electricity-free solution — Embrace, a sleeping bag that safely warms babies.

An infant respirator, designed by students
Respirators aren’t one size fits all, and when a sick baby or small child with pneumonia needs one, using a version created for adults can damage their lungs. A group of Stanford design students have crafted a genius solution — a small, flexible mask called AdaptAir. Now a graduate, designer Alejandro Palandjoglou is looking to have the product manufactured. [Fast Company Design]

Jaundice treatment for rural hospitals
At TEDxStanford, mechanical engineer Krista Donaldson spoke about the same problem Timothy Prestero confronted — bringing blue light treatment devices to hospitals in the developing world for babies with jaundice. In this talk, Krista describes how her nonprofit D-Rev created Brilliance, a phototherapy device that is hard to misuse, even in areas like rural India where power outages are frequent.

A sleep apnea monitor made from bike parts
Infants often experience disruptions in breathing while they sleep — but for premature babies, even small gaps can cause severe damage. While nurses in neonatal wards are tasked with monitoring breathing, staffs in overcrowded hospitals in the developing world are easily overwhelmed. A team of students at Rice University set out to create a cheap device to assist and came up with the Babalung Apnea Monitor, a device strapped to a baby’s waist. If a baby stops breathing for 20 seconds, a bicycle light goes off. It begins flashing if breathing doesn’t resume within five seconds. [GizMag]

In the past decade, we’ve changed the way we collectively view the health of the 7 billion people who occupy this planet. Health issues were once seen as an isolated national or regional problem; now they are a global concern. In What’s Killing Us: A Practical Guide to Understanding Our Biggest Global Health Problems, 2011 TED Senior Fellow and healthcare expert Alanna Shaikh lays out the most important challenges and issues in global wellness – from tuberculosis and HIV/AIDS to flu, maternal mortality, and the diminishing effectiveness of antibiotics – while untangling the web of jargon that so often permeate those discussions. Shaikh, who runs the international development focused-blog Blood and Milk, also provides clear ideas about how these worldwide problems can be managed.

In What’s Killing Us, you concentrate on 10 major health topics. Why just 10?

Because they cover a wide and varied range of health issues. Understanding them will give you the background you need to learn about any global health topic. These are some of the most important issues that the human race is facing, although they’re just the highlights of the many health threats that endanger us.

What are the most promising initiatives you’ve seen to improve global health?

Although it has taken some criticism lately,  The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria has elevated global health to a consistent international priority. I am also excited about inviting more people into health care – training community health workers, giving nurses more responsibility, and teaching people to care for their own health. Making good health is everyone’s job, not just the job of physicians. Our new focus on improving health systems is also inspiring. Looking at health and health care in a broader social and national context makes a huge difference.

How real are the threats of a global pandemic?

Our globalized lifestyles mean that there is almost no way to stop infectious diseases from spreading rapidly and internationally. When a very contagious disease crops up, we’re all at risk. We got off easy with swine flu because it was highly contagious but was not all that dangerous once you had it. There is no guarantee the next pandemic will be as benign.

We see a number of philanthropists, Bill Gates among them, devoting a lot of time and cash to improving health. How important are these actions?

Tremendously important. Global health is a field where targeted international effort and investment has a powerful impact on human lives. Many global health problems are things we know how to solve if we just had the funding to do it.

What are the health issues that we should worry about the most in the next five to 10 years?

The two biggest are climate change and tuberculosis. Drug-resistant tuberculosis is the big one. Tuberculosis (TB) is evolving so that our current drugs can’t treat it. TB is also contagious through the air so it spreads in situations like crowded cities and public transport. And climate change will be the biggest single threat to human health, causing everything from famine to natural disasters to new infectious diseases. We should also worry about the growth of non-communicable diseases like cancer, diabetes, and heart disease. Rates of these diseases are rising rapidly. Finally, as the planet urbanizes we need to start make making good, deliberate choices about the design of cities. If cities just grow without any government thought about the health of people in them, it will be a health catastrophe.

What’s Killing Us: A Practical Guide to Understanding Our Biggest Global Health Problems is part of the TED Books series. They are available for the Kindle and Nook, as well as on Apple’s iBookstore.