10,000 Brilliant Ideas

mHealth stands for mobile health and basically means using mobile phone technology to improve health systems. While visiting the MDR-TB clinic yesterday I looked into how they keep their records and how they report them. Basically each patient has a paper file, some data of which is transcribed into a register book, which is then typed into a computer. So basically data is entered 3 times at least. Health workers sometimes don't consider it a priority (surprise!) to enter their numbers in the computer and sometimes let things get backed up. In discussion with the people there, it again seemed clear to me that data should be entered once, electronically. (You may be tempted to think that triple entry improves accuracy, but actually it only reflects the accuracy of the transcribing since data is only taken from the source once.) But there's another problem. Computers aren't so abundant. And even if they were, internet connections and power connections aren't so abundant...

This may not be a good idea, but it is an idea and I had it, so here goes. I visited a treatment center for multi-drug resistant tuberculosis yesterday. The treatment is huge. It lasts two years and requires patients to come in every day and take gut-wrenching drugs. It's often very tough for patients to continue treatment (in fact that's why most have drug resistant TB because they didn't adhere to their original treatment.) While I was there, patients were hanging around for awhile. I asked why and was told that they each have their own style of taking the drugs to make it easiest on the stomach. So here's my idea. Create an intense telenovela series of 700 twenty-minute episodes. Play one episode a day over and over again for the patients who come in. Each episode will end with such a cliff-hanger that everyone will have to come back for the next installment. Thus adding another motivation to get to the clinic to get your daily treatment.

This would be way fun to build. The basic idea is a decorative water fountain that has the illusion of perpetual motion. A simple version could be a belt with buckets that brings water up to the top of a cascading waterfall sort of thing which at the end propels a wheel that turns the belt with buckets. Hidden in the water track somewhere would be a pump that would add water to the cascade and make the whole thing possible. But it would seem like it was just going by itself. Of course you could make super elaborate versions, junkart versions, elegant elitist versions. The possibilities are *wink* endless!

We hire you. You pick a business plan to develop You make it happen You benefit from growth as well as us You have options later of buying us out or something else. Kind of a business incubator idea, but we pay you. You get job security and get to be your own boss. We own partial rights to your start-up with the ability to negotiate purchase down the road. We put up capital and know-how of senior entrepreneurs on your team. After one of your ideas takes off, you become the senior entrepreneur to help someone else succeed. This idea keeps coming back to me. The ultimate goal would be to hire and make financially comfortable as many people as possible (including me). This idea is also scalable. Scalable like a fractal. Since support is local to the project, once rolling there's no reason it can't roll very quickly. The scope of supported projects is that it has to "make life better for people". It is designed to be socially responsible from the outset and ...

"Oooh, what cute watches your kids have!" "Thanks, they're Twennies." "What are Twennies?" "Funny you should ask. The Twenny watch is the latest, greatest, kid communicating and tracking device! I simply put the watches on my kids in the morning with a key we keep at home. They don't come off without the key. If they ever need to talk to me, they just push the button on the top. I can them communicate with them from my smart phone. If I ever need to talk to them, I call them in a similar way. They don't even need to answer, it automatically connects so they can hear my voice and I can hear what's around them. And with my smart phone I can see precisely where they are to within 5 meters! I can even set an alarm to tell me if my kids are more than a few meters away from me. I don't have to ask 'what's your Twenny?' I always know! The watches are waterproof and virtually indestructible. Should some low-life ever try ...

I have no idea if this would work, but let's imagine you get some wealthy-enough family from a developed country to buy into this and donate 1000 dollars. - You find a poor community. (The poorest. The kind that even microcredit can't really help.) - Register everyone who's interested and charge an extremely low in fee (like a nickel). Just to get some initial commitment. - Find leaders or have community select a panel. - Have leaders select a timeline and a few competitions that would reward model citizens of that community (like: most neighborly, hardest worker, most athletic, most improved house or whatever the community values that is acceptable to the organizers and donors.) - Also let the donors pick 1 or 2 categories based on a range of acceptable ones from the organizers. - Also have at least one "people's choice" award. - Run the competition for a day, week or month or whatever's appropriate. - Have judges or whatever was decided choose w...

"Where nerds rule!" A theme park based on Newtonian physics. Why hasn't this been done before?! Imagine a theme park with roller coasters like the mobius (the ride with one side). Bumper cars on a track with different surfaces with different frictional properties. Launch rocket where you can see the hydraulics at work. A giant rocking-boat-style ride run on a Foucault pendulum . Games where you try and shoot a target that is dropped when you pull the trigger. Or games where you get 5 minutes to answer some heinous physics question. Every ride has 1 or more learning spots where you can learn about what's making the thing fun. And of course you can break a few records with the largest air cannon, or the furthest speak to each other via concave disk thingy. You are greeted upon entering the park by an enormous and elaborate Rube Goldberg-inspired perpetual motion fountain . Really the possibilities are endless. Here's why it would work: You have two types of ...