The challenges of public presentations and the stress of putting your designs on the line transcend cultural boundaries.  On our internship Emily and I were charged with not only watching and giving comments on the 5^th year students’ final design presentations, but also helping to judge and evaluate the effectiveness of their designs.

The presentations started at the Biomedical engineering level, with students presenting a variety of technologies and designs ranging from a medical equipment database to a new hospital safe washing machine.  Since there is a general lack of physical materials in the University, many of the hardware projects used simulations and simple prototypes to present and evaluate their creations.

A lot of the students had fairly ambitions projects (one wanted to build a portable dialysis machine), and although not everyone met their design objectives in the short 3 month design window, they all made awesome progress and had something to show once the time came to finally present.

After all of the Biomedical students offered their projects before the judges and their professors, the top 2 presentations went forward to be judged across the entire Jimma Institute of Technology.  We were also invited to attend and help evaluate those presentations, and got a lot of reading between the lines insight about the strengths and weaknesses of the different departments at the institute.  A biomedical team wasn’t selected as one of the top two presentations to then advance to the university level, but the SMART Biomedical Equipment Management team did come in a close third!  Interestingly, the winning team from electrical engineering actually presented a design addressing a biomedical problem (remote patient monitoring through a web-based interface).

Overall Emily and I were really excited about the potential of the projects and recommended that the different departments look to both cooperate more in the future and give the students more time to really flesh out their designs.  A lot of the student groups seemed interested in continuing their work after school, and we hope that a lot of these projects can become workable local designs deployed across Ethiopia and the rest of Africa!  Locally produced technology would provide both an immediate economic boost and technologies that can be supported and maintained here in the long run.