This is the first part of a two-part conversation with Victoria Jaqua and Adam Popanda at Glia, a Canada-based company that develops and manufactures open-source medical devices. These devices were designed in part for manufacture by resource-restrained individuals and communities that otherwise cannot afford or do not have access to these sorts of devices. Part two of our conversation will be posted Tuesday.
This conversation focuses on their tourniquet, which can be manufactured cheaply with just a 3D printer and a sewing machine. All the tourniquet’s design documents, along with those for their other products, are available on Github for free to anyone for manufacture and modification. They have also made their tourniquet testing system public so users can test the tourniquets they make.
I mention in the introduction to this episode, as Victoria discusses in more depth in the conversation, that Glia’s 3D-printed tourniquet was field-tested in Gaza during the Great March of Return demonstrations in 2018-2019.
Glia Medical Director Tarek Loubani was there in 2018 and honestly details here and here the team’s failures, the challenges encountered, and the progress made during the tourniquet’s first real-world deployment. This work allowed Glia and colleagues in Gaza to further refine their design and methods to the point where its tourniquets are being reliably utilized today by first responders in Gaza and elsewhere.
Loubani’s posts are extremely informative, but I also think they can give you a better appreciation for the literal blood, sweat, and tears that went into developing this life-saving device.
More information about the Glia Tourniquet Project can be found here on their website. Here you can support their work generally and their specific campaigns in Gaza, Ukraine, Kenya, and Zambia. This video from April details Glia’s other work in Gaza:
3D-printed tourniquets saving lives in Gaza and Ukraine - a conversation with Glia's Victoria Jaqua and Adam Popanda, part I