IGH: Innovators for Global Health at Northeastern University

IGH is an interdisciplinary student organization dedicated to educating and empowering scientists, engineers, and aspiring medical professionals to use their skills to improve healthcare delivery in the developing world. Through medical device design projects and global service trips, the club will serve as a space for members to develop the global health literacy and technical skills required to address pressing needs in global healthcare. The main focus of the club is to apply knowledge and hands-on experience from classwork and co-op to biomedical, mechanical, electrical and chemical engineering in a global context.

Our Design Group is dedicated to designing and prototyping low-cost, sustainable medical devices tailored to the needs of low-resource hospitals. Recent design projects have included a surgical lamp, EKG electrodes, and a pulse oximeter. Currently, our projects include an oxygen regulator splitter, a medical suction pump valve/alarm, a low-cost hospital bed, and an infant incubator. Each of these projects was chosen based on in-person needs assessments at our partner hospitals. Design group is a great place to research medical device needs and problems, come up with creative solutions, and build engineering skills. This is the truly “engineering” portion of IGH, but you don’t need to have experience or even be an engineering student to contribute!

Our Campus to Country group is dedicated to educating our members about global health issues and researching the commercialization of medical devices in low-resource nations. Thus, they seek to identify gaps in medical care faced by low-resouce nations and look for ways that these gaps can be sustainably addressed by the work of organizations like IGH and others. In addition, we work with local students and technicians to help them build engineering, design, and needs assessment skills.

In addition to our main groups, we also often feature speakers in the global health field and conduct fundraising for our yearly international trips and design projects.