Maria Luckyanova, 21
MIT
by Dan Loeterman // University of Southern California
Coming up with clever answers to
tricky questions is Maria Luckyanova's specialty. This engineering major isn't
tempted by fancy robotics or complicated computing, the bells and whistles that
often adorn inventions flowing from MIT's classrooms. She knows the answer to
"How much does your invention cost?" is much less important than, "Does it
work?"
"Being an engineer," she says,
"what you get is a problem, and what you make is a solution."
Last year, when Luckyanova took an
engineering class focused on the developing world, the problem was how to
create a device that could be used to fit patients in rural parts of India with
prosthetic limbs, without using electricity. The solution had to be simple,
some sort of tool made of cheap materials that could be easily exported to
poorer countries and remote areas. All that, and the device had to be used
without a power source. It must have seemed a bit like the scene in "Apollo 13"
when Ed Harris dumps a pile of tape, socks and coffee filters on a table and
tells his engineers to make a CO2 filter.
"Our very initial prototype was
this horrible gaudy construction," Luckyanova says. "The whole thing was
terribly clunky and not that robust, but it worked."
The answer for Luckyanova and her
team-three classmates and a graduate student mentor-utilized four bicycle pumps
and two small wheels. To fit a prosthetic limb, technicians first need to make
a mold of the body part that has been amputated, or the "residual limb." In
poorer areas, the doctors can use a bag of sand to make mold of a patient's arm
or leg. After placing the limb in a bag of sand, a pump, powered by a generator,
sucks all of the air out of the bag, creating a perfect vacuum. When the limb
is removed, the sand stays in place, as firm as a rock, and can be used to
produce an exact replica of the residual limb and fit a prosthetic arm or leg.
But generators cost thousands of
dollars to operate, and it's difficult to bring them to the highly rural areas
where many patients live. The latest version of the device Luckyanova helped
design allows patients or a technician to power the pumps by turning the wheels
manually.
Last summer, Luckyanova and two of
her team members traveled to India to meet with technicians from Jaipur Foot,
one of the world's largest nonprofit organizations dedicated to making
prosthetic limbs available to patients who can't afford them. At the Jaipur
Foot clinics, Luckyanova and the others showed an early version of their device
to doctors overwhelmed by the number of patients in need of limbs and
frustrated by high electricity and plaster costs that prevented them from
treating more patients outside the major cities. The trip was a major wakeup
call for the group.
"Going there, it was sort of like
getting hit with a brick wall," Luckyanova says.
The team was blown away by the
experience, and they traveled to India again this past winter to demonstrate an
updated model. The prosthetic technicians were so impressed that they want to
start utilizing the devices in many of their clinics by this summer.
Luckyanova and her team haven't
filed any patents, and they don't plan to. They haven't hired any consultants
or had discussions with lawyers. Though marketing it might have seemed an
obvious tactic to business majors, making money off the device was never an
option for Luckyanova. She'd already solved her problem.
"Most of the people that come to
them are dirt poor. You see every day 20 people leave these clinics and they
can walk, and it's amazing. So making money off that never crossed our mind at
all," she says.
Luckyanova isn't sure what she
wants to do after she graduates. She's passionate about sustainable energy, an
increasingly crucial (and lucrative) field of study. She sees coal plants
popping up in China, inefficient solar and water technology, and an
overabundance of pollution in developing countries-in short, a whole slew of problems
waiting to be solved by some creative engineer. Fitting prosthetic limbs taught
her how rewarding an experience like that can be.
"Working as a student, you don't
expect anything you do to ever have any effect. Someone is always watching over
you and correcting you, and you think there's nothing I can do that's new," she
says. "In this case... there was nobody to tell us well that's a nice effort,
now let the professionals do it."
Photo by Natasha Coleman // Harvard University
