MANCHESTER , New Hampshire ( CNN ) -- If you listen to inventor Dean Kamen , the biggest health problem facing the world today is not AIDS , obesity or malnutrition . It 's a shortage of water . Dean Kamen hopes to tackle the world 's fresh water shortage with the Slingshot , a water purifying device . Water is the most abundant resource on the planet , yet less than one percent of the Earth 's freshwater supply is readily available to drink , according to the World Health Organization . Lack of accessible or clean drinking water , exacerbated by drought , is crippling communities in many developing countries . `` In your lifetime , my lifetime , we will see water be a really scarce , valuable commodity , '' Kamen says . Those are scary words from the man whose creations include the Segway personal motorized scooter and the Luke ( as in Skywalker ) prosthetic arm . But the forward-thinking inventor and his team at DEKA Research in Manchester , New Hampshire , are n't sitting around waiting for the world 's wells to dry up . They 've been working on an invention they say can tap into 97 percent of the world 's undrinkable water . It 's called the Slingshot , and it 's a portable , low energy machine that is designed to purify water in remote villages where there 's not a Wal-Mart in sight . The device takes its name from a well-known story . `` We believe the world needs a slingshot to take care of its Goliath of a problem in water , '' Kamen says . `` So we decided to build a small machine and give it to the little Davids . '' Perhaps you 've heard about the Slingshot , which Kamen has been working on for more than 10 years . Over that time it has turned dirty river water , ocean water and even raw sewage into pure drinking water . Kamen says it can turn anything that looks wet , or has water in it , into the `` stuff of life . '' The magic behind the Slingshot is a `` vapor compression distiller '' that stands between what looks like two empty fish tanks connected by a couple of hoses . One tank contains the contaminated liquid , the other is for the newly clean water . Watch Kamen demonstrate the Slingshot » . The Slingshot boils , distills and vaporizes the polluted source , in turn delivering nothing but clean water to the other side . And it does it all on less electricity than it takes to run a hair dryer . In summer 2006 , Kamen delivered two Slingshots to the small community of Lerida in Honduras . They were used for a month and Kamen says everything ran as planned . `` The machine worked very well down there , taking virtually any water that the people from that village brought to us , '' he says . `` All the water that we got from the machine was absolutely pure water . '' But there 's a problem . Kamen says each Slingshot costs his company several hundred thousand dollars to build . He 's looking to partner with companies and organizations to distribute Slingshots around the world , but says a little more engineering work needs to be done in order to lower the production costs . Kamen says the company would like to get the price down to about $ 2,000 per machine . `` The biggest challenge right now between this being a dream and a reality is getting committed people that really care about the state of the world 's health to get involved , '' Kamen says . The world 's population is quickly approaching 7 billion , making access to clean water that much more important . According to the World Health Organization and UNICEF , more than 3.5 million people die every year from water-related diseases and almost 900 million do n't have access to a safe water supply . Kamen says people in developing regions of the world need the Slingshot as soon as possible . He also thinks the problem with polluted water will spread beyond small villages . He says one Slingshot machine can supply about 250 gallons of water a day , which is enough for 100 people . That 's a lot of Davids . `` It is literally like turning lead into gold , '' he says . `` But I believe it 's more important , because you ca n't drink lead or gold . ''
Segway inventor David Kamen wants to solve the world 's fresh water shortage . Kamen has designed a portable water purifying machine called a Slingshot . The machine is designed to provide water in remote areas of developing nations . But assembly costs remain too high for the machine to be mass produced .