Water Everywhere?

The last project presented attempted to solve the age old problem of drinking water. As long as people have been on this planet they have set up camp and civilizations around bodies of drinking water. Today, the people of the earth are having a hard time finding drinking water that is not polluted, infested, or crawling with microorganisms. Hundreds of engineers have tackled the problem of providing water where it is scarce or cleaning the undrinkable water. Many people have turned to ground water. However, when water is removed from the ground it creates a cavern that begins to collapse. In order to solve this problem the final group designed the iDro.
The iDro is a portable device powered by a crank to heat one and one half liters of filter water. They used four coils insulated by styrofoam and a carbon filter with an aluminum casing and carried by a strap. It is a really interesting and ambitious idea. They used kinetic energy as the main power source which is the most efficient in general and the most cost efficient. All over the world people are trying to move to some sort of kinetic energy. People are building dams with generators and even when the automobile was invented it had to be started by a hand crank. This could also be applied to other sources in need of a heat source or short term electricity. Especially if this tech is as affordable as they said int their presentation.
The concern I have with this device is not the power method but the filter. They used a simple carbon based filter in the design but today even water filters used for already drinkable water have a five layer filtering system. I fear that this affordable filter would filter out larger particles like heavy metals but not the smaller particles such as the harmful ions in mammal urine. I think with a bit of tweaking to the design this design could really be revolutionary. Very few designs institute a filtering systems and a heating system to remove the bacteria and other single cell organisms, like this one.
The designers went through a lot of trouble to research the white whale of a problem. I think the main problem after the filter that they might run into is cost. In previous research attempting to remedy this problem, the main problem has been funding and making a device that would be affordable in poorer countries.