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Comment by tonylemesmer | Hacker News Reader

It is wonderful isn't it?

My opinion as a biomedical engineer is that there is a lack of exposure of these real problems because, really, how many people know someone with Parkinsons? But when companies like this solve them in such an elegant way they can appear pretty cool and dare I say "sexy".

So its an obvious solution, but I wouldn't say its an obvious problem. The list of problems is probably huge and a forum for capable engineers and designers to browse and help solve them would be awesome.

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" forum for capable engineers and designers to browse and help solve them would be awesome."

That is an awesome idea - it seems like I've seen/heard of something similar, but if not, I'm a web programmer who could bang that together rather quickly.

Before I do, has anyone heard of an existing site/forum?

It sounds like an obvious solution doesn't it ;) ?

The key to making this work would be an adequate capture of the context as well as a description of the problem. In the product design world we use "Personas" as a vehicle for packaging problems into descriptions of user needs. They give the user a demographic and allow the designer to imagine that person and how they might use a potential solution. This allows to designer to avoid imposing their own preconceptions or doubts onto the context or idea before it is even a mere wisp of a concept.

If you can capture this in a spam free, usable and elegant website I reckon you'll be on to something. Not sure how you'd monetise the output, but then that's why I've never finished the 50 or so website projects I started.

not everything needs to be monetized :-)

I'll look these comments & site over and discuss with friends a bit; obviously, creating a site is the easy part

There's sub reddit[1] i tried for some time , but didn't really stick to it.

The hard part here is building a community of people who will contribute problems and content around problems. This might be bootstrapped at the beginning either by putting effort in searching the web for such problems, and asking experts around the web about problems, and slowly building a database.

Such content could be a pull for some groups of people, many of them will be more interested in solutions ,but some will be a source of more problems.

And there's also the question of exposing the information in such a way to encourage innovation and not just reading.Not sure what the right way to do this, but it's interesting.

It's not easy to create a high quality content/community site around this , but when solved well this could be a really valuable site.

[1]http://www.reddit.com/r/realproblemsolvers

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