This is an incredibly exciting project -- congrats to the Prakash lab. One of the most exciting advances in global health and science education I've seen in a long time.
Given where some of their funding is from (Gates Foundation, NIH Fogarty Institute Global Health Equity Scholars (GHES) Fellowship, other global health foundations), I really hope they open source this design under an appropriate open source license. The benefits to the developing world of having this design available to the public under an open source license are tremendous.
The laser cutting surprised me. I know it's almost certainly just for prototyping, but I couldn't help but think that a full scale industrial process could drive costs far lower. I would love to work on the line trying to produce a quarter million a day per line. Ram a ribbon of that paper between an anvil roll and a pattern cutter, with another line rounding and polishing ball bearing lenses.
I hope it takes off - these sorts of cheap tech solutions will bootstrap the rest of the world faster than anything else!
Yeah, their plan is to use a die cutter for mass production of the paper parts. The glass beads used as lenses are already mass produced for other applications.
Source: I've worked with them on an educational pilot of foldscope.
> To sign up for the “10,000 Microscope Project” where Prakash will give away 10,000 build-your-own-Foldscope kits to 10,000 people who pledge to share their experiences and experiments on his website, go here: http://www.foldscope.com/contact-us/
Why is this impressive? It's not made out of paper. I see plastic lenses, LEDs and batteries. I can buy a microscope on eBay for less than $2 (http://www.ebay.com/bhp/pocket-microscope). Why is it better for the housing to be made out of paper than plastic?
The pocket microscopes you linked to provide 60x magnification. Imaging of most microbial infections that can be diagnosed visually requires at least 1000x magnification.
The Foldscope project provides over 2000x magnification.
Also, the 50-cent cost is right now. They hope to get the cost down significantly lower by scaling up production.
Finally, it doesn't hurt that the Foldscope is significantly more rugged than a plastic microscope. You could easily stack a thousand of them in a small pack and bring them to some remote region on foot, horse, or motorcycle.
That's one of the better "we made a thing" videos I've seen in a long time. Major props to the video team and Manu Prakash, that was excellent.
And the thing is cool, bordering on "coolest thing in a long time". This would also be phenomenal for use in schools, especially with younger kids. I really really want to see lots of these built and sold and in everyone's hands.
I agree that these are great for teaching kids science, but there are a few hurdles. First, kids don't really know what makes a good slide - they'll take opaque things like a orange peel and hope to see something (you can only see transparent or semi-transparent stuff). Second, it takes a fair bit of attention to learn how to hold it up to your eye and move the focusing stage around. Third, it's hard for a young kid to build one of these without supervision, and if you're a teacher in a 30-kid classroom, you can't supervise kids individually. None of these problems are insurmountable, but they do prevent Foldscope from being an instant educational hit.
I think most of the educational value is gained from having access to a microscope, not having each child able to build one. A teacher who builds one in class with the kids watching and then selects a useful slide and projects it on a wall will likely get you 95% of the benefit. "Look at this unboiled water vs this boiled water".
I didn't have to build my microscope at school but it was still educational to have access to one. This is primarily for kids that don't have what we had. (At least from an educational perspective - the medical perspective is arguably more important.)
If you can drop a bunch of tablets in a village and kids can get themselves up to speed with no supervision, I sure that these problems are insurmountable :-)
The more I read about learning, the more I think structure, testing and to a lesser extent supervision are detrimental to younger kids. My little girl brings home weekly spelling tests at the age of 5, I'd much rather give her things like this, a minimal amount of instruction and let her loose!
just an FYI, but judging from the context of your comment I think you may mean "surmountable". Insurmountable means they cannot be overcome.
I have to totally agree with you about learning though. I went to a Montessori school for much of my youth and really attribute my love for learning to it.
The day is divided into blocks, and the classroom is divided into sections of activities related to subjects. The child has to do a certain number of activities for each subject each week, but they get to choose when and what they did.
These are not real hurdles. The whole point of education is that kids learn the things you describe.
If a kid builds a microscope, takes orange peel, and recognises that they don't see anything because it's opaque, that's great - it's frustrating but they learned something.
As a child, we weren't allowed to mess around with the microscopes because they were too expensive. But messing around with microscopes is exactly what kids should be doing.
Well, they were hurdles for us when we taught a classroom of fourth graders how to make Foldscopes. Kids give up on things quite easily and don't necessarily think a free personal microscope is cool.
OK, I understand now. In case you read this later, I wanted to respectfully suggest that fourth grade was the wrong classroom for you to be in:
* fourth graders are still developing their fine motor skills and not all will be physically capable of construction-type work.
* fourth graders don't really have enough science background to understand why they should be interested in microscopes (let's say, they would learn more playing with a 2-10x magnifying glass)
* as you identify, fourth graders have short attention spans which are still developing. If you're teaching, you have a responsibility to manage this.
If you were going to demo to a seventh grade class, I would warn you of the same issues, honestly. On the other hand, I would be very excited to have you in any classroom eighth grade and above.
Valid points :) One place you may want to look at is the home-school crowd. They pretty often can't afford a microscope, and the 30-kid-classroom problem doesn't exist.
Kind of wary about putting a sample of Malaria-infected fluid up to my face like that. But mostly I'm jealous that nothing I'm working on stands to have a tenth the impact this could make.
If it's under a microscope slide cover then you're pretty safe - the fluid is sandwiched between the slide & the cover and isn't going to go anywhere.
(You don't normally try and image free standing droplets that could run off for a couple of reasons: Except for the clearest liquids they'd be too optically thick to see anything useful and you'd have problems focusing on objects that can move in the z direction as well as laterally with respect to the lens.)
Plus, malaria isn't transmitted via fecal-oral or respiratory route, so holding it up to your face isn't terribly risky. Taking the sample is much more risky, since there are sharps involved.
How does the microscope cost compare with paying the technician who will do the diagnosis? Assuming even $1000 per tech - which is roughly the per capita GDP(nom) of many countries - in this case maybe it's just better to buy the scopes in volume from Alibaba?
So the real value of the 50-center may be for people to make their own samples, and use a local shop to upload a cell phone picture to an online analysis service. Running on the cloud, maybe?
The more expensive microscope will be good enough when you already know what application you have in mind. The almost free microscope let's you explore without risk.
"Although it costs less than a dollar in parts (see Bill of Materials in table 1), it can provide over 2,000X magnification with submicron resolution, weighs less than two nickels (8.8 g), is small enough to fit in a pocket (70 × 20 × 2 mm3), requires no external power, and can survive being dropped from a 3-story building or stepped on by a person (see figure 1G and supplementary video 2)."
It's not just a hole. There is a ball lens that provides 140x magnification. The lens can be translated in the x, y, and z directions. To me, that's deFinitely a microscope.
He's infuriated because, despite the hype, the TED talk and the Gates funding, it's not clear why this is better than other simple microscopes which can be made for even less money. Also, why does it need to be so cheap? Not everyone in a poor community needs one of these. Surely they could buy/receive a more conventional instrument and share it.
By trading off field of view, eye relief, brightness and aberrations you can get any arbitrary magnification by sticking in a different sized plastic ball lens. Just like all the 500x junk telescopes that are sold.
Given all the attention this is getting, I have to conclude that I'm missing a critical element of what makes this notable. I get that it's very cheap and can be stepped on, but maybe you can explain the application for this that wouldn't be better served by the shared use of a more conventional design made out of plastic instead of paper and which could still survive rough handling.
The paper vs plastic issue is unimportant, in my opinion. In fact, the latest designs I've seen are made of polypropylene sheets instead of paper sheets.
I think the critical element is that it's cheap to build and ship.
Again, what microscopes do you know of that are cheaper?
I do like one thing, this has the potential to inspire kids about optics. I sure would have loved to have one growing up!
These point of care services aren't limit by the cost of the microscope, they are limited by staff and the cost of histology. Most of the scopes I see at the clinic are cheap brightfield ones used to look at stained specimens, and are kept as backups when the Beckman-Colter machine fails. Can your microscope distinguish white blood cell morphology? Working with live cell imaging you learn that red-blood cells are evil because they carry no detail and little information, they are trivial to see and deconvolve. You can see relevant features even if you are beyond the diffraction limit, but then again you need those fancy slides that spread the cells out so that you can inspect them one-by-one.
Until then, for folks that can afford there are some really great ~$50 usb microscope web cams. I have this one http://j.mp/usbmicroscope, it is UVC compliant and works on Ubuntu/OS X/Windows as a web cam.
I skimmed through and it seems dedicated to the optical side of foldscope, while I was very curious on how they achieved micrometer precision, IIUC of lens parameters (position, focus) through folding ...
…but apparently nobody can actually get the thing unless they are chosen as one of 10.000 beta testers. And who knows what the actual license will be on the designs, if they are ever released.
The article mentioned spherical lenses produced as a by product of an industrial process:
The poppy-seed-sized lenses where[sic] originally mass produced in various sizes as an abrasive grit that was thrown into industrial tumblers to knock the rough edges off metal parts
> One of the unique design features of the microscope is the use of inexpensive spherical lenses rather than the precision-ground curved glass lenses used in traditional microscopes. These poppy-seed-sized lenses where originally mass produced in various sizes as an abrasive grit that was thrown into industrial tumblers to knock the rough edges off metal parts. In the simplest configuration of the Foldscope, one 17-cent lens is press-fit into a small hole in the center of the slide-mounting platform. Some of his more sophisticated versions use multiple lenses and filters.
For me this is linked to the 19bn for WhatsApp. We only spend stupid amounts on IM apps when we think there is nothing else left to spend money on.
Its similar to the USPO comment at the end of the 19C - "Everything that can be invented has been invented". With that attitude you will sink your billions into anything - but this shows there is always scope (#) for invention and innovation.
http://www.foldscope.com/ has some info about the project, but you can also signup for their beta program. re: > To signup, please send an email to [email protected] with description of community you are involved with or one question you would like to tackle. See categories below for details. @ http://www.foldscope.com/#/10ksignup/
I understand where this perspective is coming from - I could have thought the same thing when I first heard about it - but in this case it's definitely not vapourware.
I have designed, cut, and built foldscopes, and I can confirm that they work incredibly well and are cheap and quick to make.
(I knew the professor involved from my time at MIT, and worked with the group on alternate designs, as I had some previous background in folding of various sorts.)
Back up that bus without running people over... I've used them IRL and seen micro-scopic features, so your assessment seems to lack evidence.
Anyhow, crazy awesome clinical, education and novelty value. There are plenty of situations where donating lab equipment is as cruel as giving someone a white elephant, but this is the polar opposite.
The cost is mostly in the bead. The tricky part is holding it a precision distance from the focusing plane, which the paper contraption accomplishes (clearly it's been simplified). The other neat aspect of the prototypes was that one part can be sanded down more on one side than another, where sliding a part allow very fine focus.
It's not vaporware. I've built them myself. Why make such a critical and cynical comment? I ask sincerely and not judgmentally. What value does it offer other readers?
We in the tech community deal with "X made! Follow us for commercial release"...
And that day never comes for many projects. So yes, skepticism is warranted in the sciences. And frankly, until I can buy one or download the CAD drawings, it effectively does not exist.
Given where some of their funding is from (Gates Foundation, NIH Fogarty Institute Global Health Equity Scholars (GHES) Fellowship, other global health foundations), I really hope they open source this design under an appropriate open source license. The benefits to the developing world of having this design available to the public under an open source license are tremendous.
The only details I can find for licensing don't look too promising (hopefully I'm wrong): http://techfinder.stanford.edu/technology_detail.php?ID=2922...
Edit: Is the CAD file public?