To Build a Better World
Mega-inventor Dean Kamen has two simple goals: to improve children’s interest in science and technology, and to raise the standard of living for the world’s poor.
“If I’m awake, I’m working,’’ says classical Type A engineer Dean Kamen of the
way that he interprets his life style and work regimen. Kamen is President of
DEKA Research and Development Corp., Manchester, N.H., and founder of FIRST (For
Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology). Kamen is also the inventor
and developer of the Segway HT (human transport) system—the two-wheeled self-balancing
system that police tool around on at airports or the staff at Disneyworld zip
around on from one pavilion to another.
But Kamen is much more than just the developer of the Segway. Kamen is an engineer, an inventor, and an entrepreneur who has been working hard and successfully to help people lead better lives for more than quarter of a century. Triggered by his brother’s experiences while a medical student in the 1970s, Kamen invented the first portable infusion pump for reliably delivering drugs to patients. Notably, many of his inventions that followed were related to healthcare and life science problems. And with his current interests in bringing clean water and cheap power to individuals in third world countries, he has further expanded his view of personal responsibility to include humanity as a whole.
Because of his wide range of inventions, his unyielding dedication to increasing the level of interest in science and technology among students, and his continuing drive to raise the standard of living among the poorest people on earth, it is our great pleasure to award R&D Magazine’s 2006 Innovator of the Year to Dean Kamen.
Often compared to the inventiveness of Thomas Edison and Henry Ford, Kamen is much more of a revolutionary inventor, rather than evolutionary. A typical approach to his type of problem solving was noted in a patent application with his name on it that was filed earlier this year by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the high-tech development arm of the U.S. Dept. of Defense. The patent application involved shooting emergency workers, or SWAT team members, onto the roof of a building with a 4-m-high rail-mounted device powered by compressed air. The computer-controlled device could supposedly put a man onto the roof of a five-story building in less than two sec.
The IBOT mobility system was similarly developed after Kamen watched a man in a conventional wheelchair trying to get over a curb in the late-1980s. Kamen looked at the problem and saw that there were current technologies that could solve it. It took about $50 million worth of investment and nearly eight years of development, but the resultant design can climb stairs, go off-road, and “stand” perfectly balanced on two of its six wheels so that its user can communicate eye-to-eye with a standing person. The IBOT is now marketed by a division of Johnson & Johnson—a firm with which Kamen has had a long and successful relationship—and costs about $20,000, which many insurance companies and private foundations find easy to support for the additional value the design provides. The Segway HT, for its part, is basically a spin-off of many of the technologies developed for the IBOT.
A self-taught physicist, with more than 150 patents, Kamen is obviously knowledgeable about what works in the world of science and technology. But, that hasn’t always come easy. He refers to himself as a slow learner; so that once he perseveres and is able to understand a problem, he really is able to fully understand all of the intricacies of the problem, and its associated causal factors and consequences. Ever the entrepreneur and global engineering icon, external demands on Kamen’s time force him to spend less time now on the nitty, gritty details of the projects that DEKA is involved in. “My job now is to keep this place (DEKA) full of the very best people,” he says. “I lead by example and encourage them to do their very best—there’s no time to be bureaucratic.”
Large, simple problems
Kamen’s latest endeavors involve bringing clean drinking water and cheap electricity to those who don’t have access to either. More than a billion people, or nearly 20% of the world’s population don’t have access to clean drinking water. And even more, 1.6 billion or about one out of every four people on this planet don’t have electricity. Continuing his emphasis on healthcare, Kamen points out that with clean water, you can eliminate more than 75% of those people’s health problems and diseases.
Kamen’s approach to solving both of these problems is to provide a personalized distributed system of clean water and cheap electricity, rather than building large, costly centralized supply systems that mostly are not obtainable through either technological or political reasons. Kamen and DEKA envision a system of vapor compression, distillation water purifiers—code name Slingshot—that takes any type of water-based input, from sludge to urine, and purifies it into drinkable water—all in a small system that makes about 1,000 liters of potable water/day. The current design is about the size of a mini-refrigerator and only uses about 2% of the power required by traditional distillation systems.
Similarly, Kamen has developed and built a Stirling cycle-based 1-kW electrical generator that runs on any type of fuel source, including cow dung. Developed nearly 200 years ago (in 1816 by the Scottish Rev. Robert Stirling), the Stirling cycle has an inherently high thermodynamic efficiency, making it ideal for converting an energy source to electricity. However, it has always been plagued with severe design limitations to its output power and heat transfer efficiency that have mainly been limited due to materials-based issues. About 20 DEKA engineers and designers took on these challenges and created a 21st century Stirling cycle engine that takes advantage of new materials, advanced coating systems, light, high-performance gases, and microprocessor-based control systems. Kamen’s Stirling-based power machines have already been field tested in Bangladesh, and a Cambridge, Mass., start-up, Emergence Energy, is looking to license it and produce it at a reasonable cost (likely in a Third-World country).
Raising the standard
Part of Kamen revolves around the products that he and DEKA help design, develop, and produce (or license). The other part is concern for raising the interest level of children in science and technology. This other part is what caused him to initially found the highly successful FIRST program in 1989. Kamen is concerned that the U.S. is losing some of its global dominance in innovation. He notes that there are more sports management graduates in the U.S. each year now, than there are engineering graduates. When looking to what they want to be when they grow up, there is a larger “pot o’ gold” at the end of the sports management rainbow than there is at the engineering side.
He cautions that there are few incentives to encourage students to become scientists or engineers. There needs to be a consistent message from the government, the schools, and industry, that scientists and engineers will be the 21st century’s superstars, according to Kamen. “I’m concerned that the U.S. feels it has a birthright where innovation happens,” he says. The global picture appears to indicate otherwise, as Asian countries now graduate more than 12 times as many scientists and engineers every year as does the U.S. “The science and engineering community needs to get to the kids to encourage them to look at science and engineering careers,” he adds.
While Kamen agrees that it’s dangerous to make generalizations, he seems to think
that the U.S. has a special predisposition for innovation and inventiveness. “Our
engineers think more out of the box, than those in other countries,” he says.
“The free culture encourages U.S. engineers to take more risks than other more
rigid cultures, including those in Asia. America still has the spark!”
Kamen is quick to note that he is concerned, however, about the global protection of intellectual property (IP), especially as it applies to the inventions and innovations of scientists and engineers. “If the IP is not protected, then it is effectively devalued and there will be no subsequent investment in it. In this situation, the future is not necessarily brighter than the past,” he says. It is critically important to a nation to protect its IP, which then encourages investment and risk taking.
The future of innovation
When asked what recommendations he would give to an engineer who might be developing a new product, Kamen is quick to have the engineer tell you if “his new product was really important.” To make a difference and to be successful, the product has to have relevance and value to society. Too much time and energy is wasted, according to Kamen, on the design, development, production, distribution, sales, and marketing of products that don’t have any inherent value to improving the standard of living of its consumers.
The pace at which science and technology is advancing is one of the things that Kamen sees as the biggest change over the past several years. It took Kamen and DEKA eight years and $50 million to develop the IBOT self-balancing systems in the late-1990s. Earlier this month, at a National Instruments user meeting (NI Week) in Austin, Texas, at which Kamen gave the keynote speech on “Inspiring Present and Future Scientists and Engineers to Innovate,” there were students who modeled a simplified version of the Segway HT system in software in three months (while taking other classes) and then built a working system in just three days. Kamen responds to these experiments in stabilized systems by noting that the availability of sensors, accelerometers, and gyroscopes has become better, cheaper, and easier to integrate so that they can and are being performed in many colleges and even high schools. “Technology is moving so quickly, that, to succeed you now and in the future will have to know how to be the right system integrator,” says Kamen.
Previous Innovators of the Year
2001 – Dr. Stuart Parkin, IBM Almaden Research Center, Calif. Developer of giant magnetoresistance.
2002 – Larry Page, Google, Mountain View, Calif. Co-founder of Google
2003 – Dr. Ian Foster, Argonne National Laboratory/Univ. of Chicago, Ill. Developer of the Globus Toolkit
2004 – Burt Rutan, Scaled Composites, Mohave,Calif. Developer of SpaceShipOne
2005 – Dr. Mark Humayun, Univ. of Southern California, Los Angeles. Developer of the first implantable human retina.
A 2006 Innovator of the Year Sponsor
Thomson Scientific is the corporate sponsor of R&D’s 2006 Innovator of the Year program. Thomson will present Dean Kamen with his award at R&D’s Gala Awards Ceremonies on October 19, 2006 at Chicago’s Navy Pier. Thomson has also prepared an additional article on Kamen’s research citation history, which is available to view at www.scientific.thomson.com
—Tim Studt
|
But Kamen is much more than just the developer of the Segway. Kamen is an engineer, an inventor, and an entrepreneur who has been working hard and successfully to help people lead better lives for more than quarter of a century. Triggered by his brother’s experiences while a medical student in the 1970s, Kamen invented the first portable infusion pump for reliably delivering drugs to patients. Notably, many of his inventions that followed were related to healthcare and life science problems. And with his current interests in bringing clean water and cheap power to individuals in third world countries, he has further expanded his view of personal responsibility to include humanity as a whole.
Because of his wide range of inventions, his unyielding dedication to increasing the level of interest in science and technology among students, and his continuing drive to raise the standard of living among the poorest people on earth, it is our great pleasure to award R&D Magazine’s 2006 Innovator of the Year to Dean Kamen.
| Dean
L. Kamen Current Position • President and Founder, DEKA Research and Development Corp., Manchester, N.H., 1982 • Board of Directors, FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology). Founder in 1989 • Board of Directors, Segway LLC, 2001 Awards and Honors (partial listing) • Design News Medical Product of the Year, 1993 (HomeChoice Dialysis) • Kilby Award, 1994 • Hoover Medal, 1995 • Member, National Academy of Engineering, 1997 • National Medal of Technology, 2000 • Lemelson-MIT Prize, 2002 (Kamen pledged the $500,000 cash award to FIRST) • World Level of the Hall of Fame for Engineering, Science and Technology, 2002 • International Technology Institute, Rockwell Medal, 2002 • Person of the Year, 2002, Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation • EIC Golden Omega Award, 2003 • National Inventors Hall of Fame, 2005 • Honorary Doctorate, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, 1996 • Honorary Doctorate of Engineering, Polytechnic University, 2002 • Honorary Doctorate of Science, Boston University, 2006 • Inventor Representative to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office • Holder of more than 150 U.S. and foreign patents Major Product Designs (partial listing) • Independence IBOT Mobility System (A Johnson & Johnson company) • Segway HT (Segway LLC) • HomeChoice PD Peritoneal Dialysis Machine (Baxter International) • HydroFlex Irrigation Pump (Davol, Inc.) • Palmz-Schatz Balloon Expandable Stent (Cordis, A Johnson & Johnson company) |
Often compared to the inventiveness of Thomas Edison and Henry Ford, Kamen is much more of a revolutionary inventor, rather than evolutionary. A typical approach to his type of problem solving was noted in a patent application with his name on it that was filed earlier this year by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the high-tech development arm of the U.S. Dept. of Defense. The patent application involved shooting emergency workers, or SWAT team members, onto the roof of a building with a 4-m-high rail-mounted device powered by compressed air. The computer-controlled device could supposedly put a man onto the roof of a five-story building in less than two sec.
The IBOT mobility system was similarly developed after Kamen watched a man in a conventional wheelchair trying to get over a curb in the late-1980s. Kamen looked at the problem and saw that there were current technologies that could solve it. It took about $50 million worth of investment and nearly eight years of development, but the resultant design can climb stairs, go off-road, and “stand” perfectly balanced on two of its six wheels so that its user can communicate eye-to-eye with a standing person. The IBOT is now marketed by a division of Johnson & Johnson—a firm with which Kamen has had a long and successful relationship—and costs about $20,000, which many insurance companies and private foundations find easy to support for the additional value the design provides. The Segway HT, for its part, is basically a spin-off of many of the technologies developed for the IBOT.
A self-taught physicist, with more than 150 patents, Kamen is obviously knowledgeable about what works in the world of science and technology. But, that hasn’t always come easy. He refers to himself as a slow learner; so that once he perseveres and is able to understand a problem, he really is able to fully understand all of the intricacies of the problem, and its associated causal factors and consequences. Ever the entrepreneur and global engineering icon, external demands on Kamen’s time force him to spend less time now on the nitty, gritty details of the projects that DEKA is involved in. “My job now is to keep this place (DEKA) full of the very best people,” he says. “I lead by example and encourage them to do their very best—there’s no time to be bureaucratic.”
Large, simple problems
Kamen’s latest endeavors involve bringing clean drinking water and cheap electricity to those who don’t have access to either. More than a billion people, or nearly 20% of the world’s population don’t have access to clean drinking water. And even more, 1.6 billion or about one out of every four people on this planet don’t have electricity. Continuing his emphasis on healthcare, Kamen points out that with clean water, you can eliminate more than 75% of those people’s health problems and diseases.
Kamen’s approach to solving both of these problems is to provide a personalized distributed system of clean water and cheap electricity, rather than building large, costly centralized supply systems that mostly are not obtainable through either technological or political reasons. Kamen and DEKA envision a system of vapor compression, distillation water purifiers—code name Slingshot—that takes any type of water-based input, from sludge to urine, and purifies it into drinkable water—all in a small system that makes about 1,000 liters of potable water/day. The current design is about the size of a mini-refrigerator and only uses about 2% of the power required by traditional distillation systems.
Similarly, Kamen has developed and built a Stirling cycle-based 1-kW electrical generator that runs on any type of fuel source, including cow dung. Developed nearly 200 years ago (in 1816 by the Scottish Rev. Robert Stirling), the Stirling cycle has an inherently high thermodynamic efficiency, making it ideal for converting an energy source to electricity. However, it has always been plagued with severe design limitations to its output power and heat transfer efficiency that have mainly been limited due to materials-based issues. About 20 DEKA engineers and designers took on these challenges and created a 21st century Stirling cycle engine that takes advantage of new materials, advanced coating systems, light, high-performance gases, and microprocessor-based control systems. Kamen’s Stirling-based power machines have already been field tested in Bangladesh, and a Cambridge, Mass., start-up, Emergence Energy, is looking to license it and produce it at a reasonable cost (likely in a Third-World country).
| Dean’s
FIRST Passion Dean Kamen has two passions, one is for the products that he and his team develop at DEKA Research and Development Corp., and the other is for promoting FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology), which he founded in 1989. FIRST’s mission is to promote excitement in science, technology, engineering, and math in primary and secondary school-age children. Kamen serves as a member of the Board of Directors of the non-profit, multinational FIRST, which sponsors a national high school science competition that has been run since 1992. In that first year, FIRST was able to attract 28 teams and a couple of hundred children participants. In 2006, FIRST’s Robotics Competition reached more than 28,000 high school students on 1,133 teams competing in 33 regional events. FIRST also sponsors a FIRST LEGO League for children ages 9 to 14 that attracted more than 60,000 children in 2005. FIRST has some lofty goals and some big-name corporate sponsors to help it get there. The official sponsors include the likes of DaimlerChrysler, General Motors, Motorola, Xerox, Johnson & Johnson, Radio Shack, FedEx, National Instruments, and more. But running down the list of this year’s winning teams gives an even broader feel of the overall scope that this program has created with additional sponsors like Purdue, Ford, 3M, NASA, Lockheed Martin, and on and on. Obviously, a wide range of organizations and people recognize the value this program has created and the following that it has obtained. For more information: www.usfirst.org |
Part of Kamen revolves around the products that he and DEKA help design, develop, and produce (or license). The other part is concern for raising the interest level of children in science and technology. This other part is what caused him to initially found the highly successful FIRST program in 1989. Kamen is concerned that the U.S. is losing some of its global dominance in innovation. He notes that there are more sports management graduates in the U.S. each year now, than there are engineering graduates. When looking to what they want to be when they grow up, there is a larger “pot o’ gold” at the end of the sports management rainbow than there is at the engineering side.
He cautions that there are few incentives to encourage students to become scientists or engineers. There needs to be a consistent message from the government, the schools, and industry, that scientists and engineers will be the 21st century’s superstars, according to Kamen. “I’m concerned that the U.S. feels it has a birthright where innovation happens,” he says. The global picture appears to indicate otherwise, as Asian countries now graduate more than 12 times as many scientists and engineers every year as does the U.S. “The science and engineering community needs to get to the kids to encourage them to look at science and engineering careers,” he adds.
|
Kamen is quick to note that he is concerned, however, about the global protection of intellectual property (IP), especially as it applies to the inventions and innovations of scientists and engineers. “If the IP is not protected, then it is effectively devalued and there will be no subsequent investment in it. In this situation, the future is not necessarily brighter than the past,” he says. It is critically important to a nation to protect its IP, which then encourages investment and risk taking.
The future of innovation
When asked what recommendations he would give to an engineer who might be developing a new product, Kamen is quick to have the engineer tell you if “his new product was really important.” To make a difference and to be successful, the product has to have relevance and value to society. Too much time and energy is wasted, according to Kamen, on the design, development, production, distribution, sales, and marketing of products that don’t have any inherent value to improving the standard of living of its consumers.
The pace at which science and technology is advancing is one of the things that Kamen sees as the biggest change over the past several years. It took Kamen and DEKA eight years and $50 million to develop the IBOT self-balancing systems in the late-1990s. Earlier this month, at a National Instruments user meeting (NI Week) in Austin, Texas, at which Kamen gave the keynote speech on “Inspiring Present and Future Scientists and Engineers to Innovate,” there were students who modeled a simplified version of the Segway HT system in software in three months (while taking other classes) and then built a working system in just three days. Kamen responds to these experiments in stabilized systems by noting that the availability of sensors, accelerometers, and gyroscopes has become better, cheaper, and easier to integrate so that they can and are being performed in many colleges and even high schools. “Technology is moving so quickly, that, to succeed you now and in the future will have to know how to be the right system integrator,” says Kamen.
Previous Innovators of the Year
2001 – Dr. Stuart Parkin, IBM Almaden Research Center, Calif. Developer of giant magnetoresistance.
2002 – Larry Page, Google, Mountain View, Calif. Co-founder of Google
2003 – Dr. Ian Foster, Argonne National Laboratory/Univ. of Chicago, Ill. Developer of the Globus Toolkit
2004 – Burt Rutan, Scaled Composites, Mohave,Calif. Developer of SpaceShipOne
2005 – Dr. Mark Humayun, Univ. of Southern California, Los Angeles. Developer of the first implantable human retina.
| Segway
LLC Changing the World of Transport Toward the end of 2001, the nightly buzz on most media outlets was trying to figure out what “IT” was. Someone even created a Web site about IT—www.theitquestion.com. After months of speculation, IT was unveiled on ABC’s Good Morning America on Dec. 3 by developer Dean Kamen as the world’s first self-balancing human transporter. IT had an initial code name of Ginger, that Kamen expected would become commonplace terminology, like let’s ‘ginger to work.’ The name was later changed to Segway, however, which was inspired by the word segue—defined as a “smooth transition from one state to another.”
As with all vehicles and their option-driven incarnations, the Segway now comes in commuter versions, cross-terrain versions (knobby tires and all), a golf transport version, police versions, and with accessories galore. There’s even a four-wheeled version called the “Centaur” for tight, off-road situations. Governmental organizations, like the U.S. Postal Service, the National Park Service, and various police departments, have had great interest in the Segway. More than 125 law enforcement agencies now use these machines to patrol a variety of environments, including high-density urban centers, universities, shopping malls, and airports. The City of Chicago, for example, recently purchased an additional 100 Segway HTs for police, fire, and emergency management applications—they already own 50 units. A For more information: www.segway.com and read the book, “Code Name Ginger” by Steve Kemper, 2003, Harvard Business School Press |
A 2006 Innovator of the Year Sponsor
Thomson Scientific is the corporate sponsor of R&D’s 2006 Innovator of the Year program. Thomson will present Dean Kamen with his award at R&D’s Gala Awards Ceremonies on October 19, 2006 at Chicago’s Navy Pier. Thomson has also prepared an additional article on Kamen’s research citation history, which is available to view at www.scientific.thomson.com
—Tim Studt
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