Digital and Mobile Development

Philip Roessler of The College of William & Mary and Laiah Idelson of ETR both in the U.S. will test whether promoting cooperative mobile phone use in families in low-resource settings can improve household income and welfare. In their recent study, they found that providing a cost-free smartphone to poor households in Tanzania had a significant, positive impact on their economic state. The impact appeared to be catalyzed when both the male and female members of the household shared the smartphone and abolished when male members monopolized it.

The idea is to develop an artificial intelligence model capable of simultaneously analyzing data from the Laboratory Information System and from the Hospital Information System. This technology aims to enable the delivery to hospital physicians of a ranked list of antimicrobials that are more suitable to treat infection by multi-resistant microorganism with a focus on newborn and young children.

Grameen Foundation, in partnership with Ghana Health Service, aims to expand the successfully piloted MOTECH (Mobile Technology for Community Health) initiative to two new districts in a transition plan towards national scale-up. The program will reach approximately 14,000 pregnant women and 46,000 children under five over the two-year implementation, increasing access to accurate health information, generating increased demand for antenatal, postnatal and neonatal care, and providing detailed data on health service delivery and outcomes to Ghana Health Service.

Guilherme Vanoni Polanczyk from Universidade de São Paulo in Brazil will test their new method Pixel Averages for Auxological Assessment (PIXA3) that enables parents at home to frequently and precisely measure height during early childhood to help better detect and monitor growth defects in low-resource settings. The current standard for accurately measuring height requires specialized equipment and trained staff, and is thus unsuitable for frequent application.

Nathan McEachen of TerraFrame Inc. in the U.S. will build an extract, transform and load (ETL) plugin so that diverse types of data on disease incidence, spread, and interventions, recorded with different methods can be easily uploaded into the District Health Information Software version 2 (DHIS2) open-source platform, to better inform disease elimination efforts. The DHIS2 is widely used particularly across sub-Saharan Africa to report, analyze and distribute disease-relevant information.