Monicor Production Plan

1. Who will use your product?
Our community partner in Nicaragua is the Centro de Salud Vicente Godoy. Our aim is to build an electrocardiograph machine that will have an impact on the quality of medical care in clinics like this one. We anticipate that doctors and nurses will be using our device to make cardiac diagnoses in order to determine the best treatment for their patients. Moreover, the doctors and nurses using our device will have some fundamental understanding of how each of its modular components works together. In this way, we hope to give control over the product to our end users so that they are able to troubleshoot problems should they arise and even make modifications for improvement rather than treating the EKG as a black-box technology.

2. How will you get it to them?
We will put together kits of the modular components necessary for our electrocardiograph machine. Such a kit would include the grid for snapping the pieces together as well as multiple copies of the functional pieces themselves. We would first deliver the kit to our community partner in Nicaragua at the Centro de Salud Vicente Godoy. Based on the feedback we get from this clinic, we would ship similar kits to other health care facilities also in need of EKG diagnostics.

3. How much will it cost to make (the final product)?
We anticipate that the final cost of our product will be approximately fifty dollars. The amplifier and filtration circuit components each cost about a dollar, but we would include multiple copies in our final EKG kit. The conductive leads could potentially be completely locally manufacturable near zero cost. The grid and box components are machined out of wood which would run at about ten dollars. As of now, the most expensive component is our LCD display that reads out the EKG signal in real time. We are working to reduce the expense to further reduce the overall cost of our final product.

4. Where/how will it be manufactured?
Once we move the manufacturing beyond D-Lab, we would like to give the specs to a fabrication company to produce kits in bulk. We will hopefully achieve economies of scale by producing larger numbers of kits to reduce the cost of our product. The assembly of the EKG from modular components to a grid of functional components will happen at the point of care.

5. How will local community members be involved?
We want our device to enable community members to take full control over the technology that they are using. They would be responsible for assembling the EKG, modifying, and repairing as necessary. Once a few community members have been taught how to use our kits, they would be the ones to teach the next group of doctors and nurses about our technology. Ideally, we would like to be the catalysts, but the real reaction will take place in the hands of those with a personal stake.