Problems in Healthcare

• Emergency response time
• 911 emergency services are not always able to locate the emergency.
• Time to reach location can often be too long to provide first aid.
• First response needed but not everyone is trained to provide help.
• Healthcare in the home
• Difficulty for individuals who are elderly or infirmed to live independently.
• Hospice care & elderly home can often be prohibitively expensive or restrictive.
• Individuals may be unable to call for help if home alone.
• There is always the possibility of individuals mistaking pills and other prescriptions and facing hazardous or even deadly consequences.
• Security risks of handling healthcare online
• Cybersecurity concerns and breaches have become more prominent in the last years with the onset of new and numerous health monitoring apps.
• “Internet-connected healthcare products are estimated to be worth $285 billion by 2020” - http://www.healthcarebusinesstech.com/issues-impacting-hospitals-2016/
• Mental health
• Stigmas attached to mental illness still prevail today and are often propagated by harmful media.
• “In 2013, an estimated 43.8 million adults aged 18 or older in the United States had any mental illness (AMI) in the past year. This represents 18.5 percent of all adults in this country. The percentage of adults with AMI in 2013 was similar to the estimate in 2012. “ - SAMHSA Results from the 2013 National Survey on Drug Use and Health: Mental Health Findings
• Current solutions range from effective to appalling, including confining young mentally ill individuals to elderly homes or greyhound therapy, the practice of discharging seriously ill patients too soon and supplying them with a one way ticket out of town.
• Furthermore the system can often lead individuals with poor mental health to be confined in jail. There are currently close to 10 times as many individuals behind bars as there are in state funded mental institutions. - National Alliance on Mental Illness, Treatment Advocacy Center.
• Prohibitive cost of healthcare
• “A report by the Institute of Medicine Health suggests a third or more of health costs are wasted. The cost of these unnecessary, harmful early elective deliveries was estimated in a study in the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology to be nearly $1 billion per year.”- http://www.forbes.com/sites/leahbinder/2013/02/21/the-five-biggest-problems-in-health-care-today/#7f4c302216e2
• “American workers saw their out-of-pocket medical costs jump again this year, as the average deductible for an employer-provided health plan surged nearly 9% in 2015 to more than $1,000, a major new survey of employers shows. The annual increase, though lower than in previous years', far outpaced wage growth and overall inflation and marked the continuation of a trend that in just a few years has dramatically shifted healthcare costs to workers.” - http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-healthcare-costs-20150922-story.html

Problems in Education

• Standardized testing
• Students can take up to 113 standardized tests by graduation.
• Testing can  result in high stress for children, sometimes resulting in illness, tears, and throwing up during tests. In fact current regulation and guidelines now account for such disastrous situations.
• Current teacher pay is sometimes tied to test results. This can sometimes negatively affect both teachers and students when the calculated predicted scores are either improbable or even impossible (ie above 100%).
• This can incentivise fraud and cheating scandals as seen in Atlanta between 2009 and 2011.
• Current standardized tests can often be misleading and fail to reflect actual ability.
• Student debt
• “Americans owe nearly $1.3 trillion in student loan debt, spread out among about 43 million borrowers. In fact, the average Class of 2016 graduate has $37,172 in student loan debt, up six percent from last year.” - https://studentloanhero.com/student-loan-debt-statistics/
• Availability of education in areas of conflict
• “Children’s educational attainment is particularly compromised by exposure to violence. Conflict-affected countries include over 20% of all children of primary school age, but account for around half of all out-of-school children of primary school age (UNESCO, 2011, 2013). The likelihood of young children dropping out of school is also significantly higher in conflict-affected countries than elsewhere in the world: only 65% of children in these countries attend the last primary school grade, in comparison to 86% across low-income countries.” -BARRIERS TO EDUCATION IN CONFLICT-AFFECTED COUNTRIES AND POLICY OPPORTUNITIES http://allinschool.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/OOSC-2014-Conflict-and-education-final.pdf
• Lack of trained teaching staff
• “Globally, the UN estimates that 1.6 million additional new teachers are required to achieve universal primary education by 2015, and 5.1 million more are needed to achieve universal lower secondary education by 2030. Meanwhile, in one out of three countries, less than three-quarters of teachers are trained to national standards.”-https://www.globalcitizen.org/en/content/10-barriers-to-education-around-the-world-2/
• Difficulties with Charter schools and online schooling
• “A Beacon Journal review of 4,263 audits released last year by State Auditor Dave Yost’s office indicates charter schools misspend public money nearly four times more often than any other type of taxpayer-funded agency.” - http://www.ohio.com/news/local/charter-schools-misspend-millions-of-ohio-tax-dollars-as-efforts-to-police-them-are-privatized-1.596318
• Technical difficulties and personal motivation can be prohibitive to individuals enrolled in online education.
• Charter schools can close in the middle of the year due to bad business practices, leaving students without other options to continue their education for the remainder of the school year.

On a side note check out these episodes of Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (got a lot of ideas from them… and sources of information):

• Standardized Testing - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J6lyURyVz7k&t=795s
• 911 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A-XlyB_QQYs
• Mental Health - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NGY6DqB1HX8
• Student Debt - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P8pjd1QEA0c
• Charter Schools: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_htSPGAY7I

Possible Solutions

• Advanced first aid kits
• This is a solution that might address the emergency response problem.
• The key idea is a first aid kit that will talk user through the basics of applying first aid.
• Connected to emergency services in order to appropriately display an individual's location when needed.

• Home and hospital automated pill dispensers
• This is a solution that might address the issues with independant living for the elderly or infirmed as well as help cut down on the possibilities of individuals overdosing or missing out on prescribed medicine.
• The key to this design is a dispenser that can hold a plethora of different pills and accurately dispense the correct number of each at the right time while drawing the attention of the user.
• The machine should be able to connect with each patient's health care provider as to be able to update itself when prescriptions change as well as order new pills when supplies are low.

• Educational E-Readers
• This is a solution that might address the issues with online and home learning as well as, if adapted correctly, education in areas of conflict and refugee centers.
• The key to this idea is a portable e-reader that is preprogrammed with the necessary teaching resources and exercises to provide a complete grade level education.
• As a device that is dedicated to only education, it is free of the normal distractions that are common on personal computers (ie social media, video games, etc)
• The device should be able to connect with others in the region to be able to accurately take user statistics (ie time used, subjects covered, general competency), as well as allow users to work together on projects and exercises. This will hopefully  
• The product should be made of a durable material and given a solar panel for areas conflict and refugee camps. As the budget for such a device might be tight, it is possible that each community could be limited to only one e-reader. In these cases, hopefully a responsible adult could be trained to use the resources the device contains to properly teach educate all children in the immediate vicinity and possibly learn something themselves.