Nevan Hanumara, PhD
Instructor | MIT
Nevan Hanumara, PhD is an engineer who actually likes people. He works at the intersection point of both humans and machines and academia and industry, with a focus on healthcare technology. He co-teaches the MIT Medical Device Design course, which brings together doctors and engineers. He mentors multiple early-stage healthcare startups and has worked with students and large companies worldwide to teach design. Nevan is a graduate of both MIT’s Mechanical Engineering department and the University of Rhode Island’s International Engineering Program. He served as the project manager of the ventilator project where he did his best to control the chaos.
UNNOVATION – A New Perspective on Designing Inclusive Healthcare Technology
In March 2020, as the U.S. was going into lockdown, a multidisciplinary MIT team formed to help in addressing the impending shortage of ventilators. How could we design and disseminate a device that would be functional for patients with COVID-19, safe and fabricated widely, and at a fraction of the cost typically associated with medical devices? Our lighting-speed research and prototyping helped to support ventilator efforts worldwide. Over the course of the project, we coined the term “unnovation” to describe our process of stripping away complexity, looking back through the history of a technology, focusing on the fundamentals, and combining old and new.
The MIT Emergency Ventilator Case Study – emergency-vent.mit.edu
