It's TED Talks Daily. I'm Elise Hugh. Today, a talk about the technology or tools we need to survive, whether it's wells necessary for clean water or lately the refrigerators we need to keep vaccines cold.

In her talk from Ted Monterey, 2021, technologist Nifia Ramanathan shares a simple,

game-changing solution that keeps life-saving equipment working.

There I was. An American woman, up to my knees in muck, wielding these strange metal boxes. I was in rural Bangladesh,

deploying sensors that we'd built in order to understand why the groundwater was making people

sick. And I attracted some attention. But my tech simply measured the problem.

The local communities that I'd really come to connect with were expecting a solution.

So I raised funds, hired engineers from the city in order to dig a deep well and bypass the arsenic

and provide access to clean water. And we celebrated.

But as I boarded the plane, I thought, what if it breaks?

I'm an engineer.

I know that's not if, but when.

When the well breaks, who will fix it?

How will they pay for it? And will they even know

there's a problem in the first place? And I soon learned that this is all too often how life-saving

equipment is deployed globally in countries with limited electricity and infrastructure.

I kept thinking, I don't want to just build sensors

that measure a problem once it's very bad.

What if instead we brought together the tech built to measure

together with the equipment built to solve?

What could we unlock? Take vaccines. Vaccines won't work if they

get too hot or surprisingly too cold. So distributing vaccines requires refrigerators, big and small,

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