As a child Massoud Hassani played in the desert near Kabul. He created wind powered toys to take advantage of the wide patches of flat land and plentiful wind. Ten years later as a product designer in the Netherlands his goal is to make his homeland safe again and alleviate the threat of landmines.
Massoud tells us that most people in Kabul have been touched by a landmine hurting someone in their family or one of their friends. Official estimates say that there are ten million landmines in Afghanistan but Hassani feels that this number is an extremely low guess. The all-purpose cost of a single landmine is twelve hundred dollars. With this fact in mind Hassani designed a landmine detector that will cost around forty euros to produce.
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The landmine detector is wind powered and rolls over a minefield to find and detonate stray mines left from previous conflicts. The Mine Kafon has several legs that spoke out from a central hub with jointed discs at the end to facilitate rolling. As the device rolls across a landmine and detonation occurs only a few of the hundreds of legs are destroyed. Because of this modular construction Massoud hopes that three or four landmines can be eradicated on one journey across the desert.
The device is built from bamboo and biodegradable plastics. A gps chip allows people to track the movements and see where the Mine Kafon has traveled to find a safe path across dangerous fields.
Mine Kafon has already been successfully Kickstarted to gain funding for prototype refining and testing in the Kabul desert minefields. The longterm goal is for Afghani citizens and youths to be able to build the detectors themselves and begin the work to rid their home of life-threatening landmines.
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/massoudhassani/mine-kafon