José Gómez Márquez, founder and director of the Little Devices Lab at The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), completed a workshop at CICS, exclusively for students of the Doctoral Program in Social Complexity. During the workshop, Gómez-Márquez spoke about the philosophy behind the Little Devices lab, the theoretical basis that supports it and several of the innovations that have been produced in the lab.

José Gómez Márquez has dedicated a major portion of his life in the academia to the design and creation of new technologies in the healthcare industry, which are accessible, easy to remake and are open to improvement by their users and patients. In order to achieve this, Gómez Márquez has focused on the creation of low cost DIY (do it yourself), tools that can be adapted, depending on the situation, to have different uses.

Gómez Márquez founded Innovations in International Health, also at MIT, where a series of healthcare technologies were created, such as the Aerovax Drug Delivery System which is a needle-free, mass inoculation system for people in remote areas. Other innovation products created at this lab are SafePilot; a cane extension for blind people, and Medikit; a set of tools for doctors and nurses to create their own medical appliances in developing countries.

Gómez Márquez has won the MIT IDEAS competition three times in the past. He is currently an expert advisor on the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (USA), a member of the European Union’s Science Against Poverty Task Force and was chosen as a TED Fellow in 2011.