About Us – Open Source Body 2018

OPEN SOURCE BODY

Can the ultra-portability of new technologies make healthcare more accessible? As an international movement, Open Science Hardware gives everyone access to medical equipment and tools for research and analysis. It also develops tools and prototypes to make it easier to customize and recycle health equipment. The Makery medialab has invited artists, scientists, healthcare professionals and designers to present and discuss issues regarding DIYbio and open hardware for healthcare. A weeklong festival of workshops, conferences, demos and performances.

Open Source Body is part of the program of the Journées nationales de l’innovation en santé 2018.

Open science hardware

In the past few years, prototypes have emerged of portable kits for medicine, DIY prostheses, portable echo-stethoscopes, open applications for medical diagnosis, and even portable laboratories. All these devices could revolutionize medical practice and reduce social inequality in terms of access to healthcare.
Outside the medical industries, which demand prohibitive costs, some researchers are developing devices to identify cancerous blood cells, chemical products in urine or monitor vital signs. These tools, which could be used for healthcare and diagnostic guidance, are often never industrialized for lack of standardization and/or documentation, thus preventing others from using them.

Access to health care

Open Science Hardware is a worldwide network of researchers, scientists, doctors, designers, activists, artists and users who advocate conceiving, designing and sharing open scientific equipment, free of copyright and freely distributed, inspired by open software and modern digital fabrication techniques. The objective of citizen science is to increase access to medical devices and tools for analysis and research, allowing them to be appropriated, customized and recycled, while lowering costs.
Open equipment for healthcare would provide a response to challenges currently faced by emergency services, medical deserts, endemic pollution, as well as first-aid medicine for high-risk communities. Open Science Hardware is also a response to global issues related to sustain development through training.

(images credits: Guillaume Ribault / Makery and GaudiLabs)

OPEN EQUIPMENT FOR SCIENCE

Favor collaborative research

Encourage learning by doing

Build resources for open education

Encourage the use of open equipment for science

Develop experimental instrumentation for sciences

OPEN EQUIPMENT FOR HEALTHCARE

Improve diagnostic guidance

Develop portable laboratories

Encourage open source for medical devices

Co-design healthcare equipment

Synergize design, certification and practice

ACCESS TO HEALTHCARE

Equip medical deserts

Support NGO for refugees and natural disasters

Provide first-aid medicine and emergency services

Respond to challenges in public health and self-help

SOCIAL JUSTICE

Better inclusiveness and equality with respect for diversity

Solidarity with minorities

Support people living in poverty

Respond to epidemics and endemic pollutions

Reduce social barriers for public participation

BIOPOLITICS

Historical evolution of public health policies

Social control of bodies in public health services

Sanitary democracy and authority of science and medicine

Citizen reappropriation of scientific challenges

NEW MEDIA FOR ART

Visualization and sonification

Do-It-Yourself gynecology

Advocating for bodily autonomy

Body art and subversive biopolitics

DIY bioart and desacralizing science and healthcare

Meet the actors

The cost of medical equipment or healthcare services can be prohibitive for countries that lack effective public services or sufficient medical equipment. We bring together the actors of medical NGO and open hardware developers to discuss possibilities for implementing new low-cost equipment in the field.

Debate legal issues

The world of medical equipment is extremely regulated. From co-design to certification, from initial field-testing to training health professionals, there is much to be debated on the future of low-cost technologies that could revolutionize medicine.

Introduce new artistic practices

Contemporary intermedia artistic practices are increasingly integrating novel scientific fields of research. We would like to discuss issues related to the biopolitical autonomy that leads to artistic practices at the intersections of performance, body art, sound and multimedia art, design, hacking, open source, biology and medicine, activism and citizen science.

Promote sustainable design

Artists, designers and hackers will present prototypes and related projects. These could be an excellent springboard for opening public debate around non-discriminatory, universal access to healthcare.

A Makery medialab event

Makery is an online information media (newsletter, website, social networks) founded in June 2014. It covers the dynamics of the emerging scene of labs, fablabs (fabrication laboratories, U.S. terminology that originated from the MIT Medialab in 2001), hackerspaces (spaces self-managed by people seeking to reappropriate technologies), medialabs, living labs, third spaces, biohacklabs.

medialab Makery

The Makery Medialab is Makery’s experimental space for bringing people together, publishing and promoting innovative projects and actions: events, media partnerships, forums and in-depth interviews; Web applications for data-journalism and software and hardware tools; training and workshops.

The Makery Medialab offers a space for the continuous reinvention of media forms by simultaneously producing and disseminating scientific knowledge, innovative tools and original data.