The James Dyson Award has announced that the awards for this 2024 edition have been given to Athena, a device aimed at preventing hair loss in chemotherapy patients, and AirXeed Radiosonde, a reusable weather sensor that reduces electronic waste.
These have been the world winners in the Medicine and Sustainability categoryrespectively, who have been victorious in this international competition for design students and which this year has received almost 2,000 proposals.
The first of them is Athenadevised by Irish product design and technology graduate Olivia Humphreys, who has invented a device to Address hair loss as a result of chemotherapy treatment.
Between 65 and 99 percent of patients undergoing this procedure suffer or will suffer from this problem, which is currently treated by cooling the scalp, a method that consists of applying icy temperatures to this area before, during and after the session. .
Current techniques mitigate hair lossas it constricts blood vessels and limits blood flow to the scalp. However, it is a practice that for some patients It can be very painful, which is why Humphreys has developed a Helmet-shaped portable thermoelectric device that applies cold to the scalp in a more cost-effective, agile way and without compromising the quality of the treatment.
This one has a weight of 3 kg, runs on batteries for up to 3.5 hours at maximum power and allows the patient to spend less time in the hospital. Furthermore, they themselves can start and end the cooling process from wherever you wanteven in your own home.
Likewise, this system will allow patients “to have more freedom, recovering part of their day, and also free up very precious time in the chemotherapy chair for other patients to receive their treatment,” in the words of the consultant oncologist at the Royal United Hospital of Bath (England), Mark Beresford. The estimated cost of Athena is about 1,000 eurosa figure lower than that of the machines in the sector, whose price is around 20,000 euros.
The other winner of the James Dyson Award 2024 in the Sustainability category has been awarded to engineers ShaneKyi Hla Win and Danial Sufiyan Bin Shaiful, from Singapore. Your project, airXeed Radiosonde aims to make weather forecasting more environmentally friendly.
Dyson recalled that every day weather stations around the world launch devices from weather balloons that collect atmospheric data, called radiosondes, which measure elements such as temperature, humidity or atmospheric pressure. All of them are transmitted to ground stations, showever, these They are single-use and generate tons of plastic and electronic waste around the world.
To achieve a more sustainable procedure, airSeed Radiosonde has presented itself as a reusable device that tackles the amount of electronic waste generated by single-use radiosondes on the market and which aims to increase the amount of atmospheric data collected by these devices, with the aim of improving the quality of the forecasts.
The device, equipped with flight navigation and GPS, has an onboard controller to manage its stability and flight path, which is enhanced with machine learning to estimate the speed and direction of the wind on board, as well as to select the best landing place.
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