Open Healthware Conference 2026 is Coming

The second Open Healthware Conference is fast approaching on July 9th and 10th in San Francisco! 

This event is entirely FREE thanks to the support of the National Science Foundation, but we’d still love to have you register so we can give you all the updates you need to attend. The Conference will take place at Gray Space and features two days of talks and tables from creators who are leading the industry on how health and open hardware overlap and work together.

You may be wondering what that actually looks like…

We’ve got Anthony Di Franco talking about the challenges in supply chains for open source medical technology, pulling on years of experience working on the Open Insulin project. Within his talk he will address both technical and policy areas, and present concrete proposals to address these challenges.

We’re happy to have Yadir Sanchez joining to discuss her project El humo llega primero, an open hardware PM2.5 air quality alarm built around an ESP32-C3 and a Sensirion SEN55 particulate sensor, inspired by growing up watching her mother, aunts, and grandmother cook in a cocina de leña. Sanchez will be focusing on building healthware from the group up, starting with the people and the place, letting that shape the design of the vessel and its placement!

Enrico Bassi will be presenting on the cross section of open hardware and hospital makerspaces, looking at repair and adaptation to low-risk medical accessories, training tools, and rapid local solutions. Hospital makerspaces can be part of a broader preparedness strategy to improve resilience and shorten feedback loops!

One of many ways of exploring assistive technologies includes Adriana Cabrera who is speaking about soft and bio technologies to create adaptive, interactive, and customizable devices for rehabilitation and assistive care. Cabrera will be pulling on experience with digital fabrication, e-textiles, programmable materials, and soft robotics to bring her work on wearable rehabilitation systems together.

We welcome Silvestr Tkac to discuss his work around 3D printing in low-resource environments. It will examine the key barriers such as non-editable file formats, dependency on hard-to-source components, unreliable power conditions, inaccessible documentation and unrealistic compliance expectations.

Liz Henry and Olga Prilepova bring focus to the right to repair movement focused on power wheelchairs. As many traditional power wheelchairs gather and send data to the manufacturer, forbid modifications and bring the difficulty of never quite owning the device, Open Assistive Tech is working on changing that.

We’ll also have some truly incredible exhibition tables with folks showing off the hardware they’ve been developing!

You’ll be able to check out the Deaftronics solar powered hearing aids designed by and for Deaf communities, developed in Southern Africa.

See the Braille Rap, an open source braille embosser that can close the gap on developing accessible text.

Criptastic will be showing off their apitherapy set up that uses honey bee venom to treat health conditions.

This only captures a small piece of what the Open Healthware Conference is all about. Join us in San Francisco this year to be able to explore all the wonderful ways people are working to democratize health and make it accessible all over the world!

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Photos courtesy of OSHWA