Introduction: program and objectives of the school. Overview on global health

I will briefly introduce the concept of sustainable development and then delve into the history of development or humanitarian engineering, which combines engineering principles applied to low resource settings. In the specific context of biomedical engineering, I will introduce data on global health and discuss the problems and pitfalls of directly applying engineering practices and principles from developed or higher resource settings without proper consideration of the local cultures, values and societal constraints, giving examples of successes and failures.