Infrastructure

The objective of our intervention is to establish SimPrints as a cost-effective technology to deliver services that increase antenatal continuity of care and community health worker (CHW) accountability. In many developing countries patient medical records are paper-based, difficult to access, and prone to loss/damage. Existing mHealth technologies are similarly limited by vulnerabilities in misidentification such as common community names or unknown dates-of-birth.

We propose a comprehensive integrated program to address the comprehensive interrelated factors leading to poor maternal and child health. We combine service delivery improvements with demand-side innovations and multiple mobile phone applications. These include safe delivery kits, insurance for transport and treatment of obstetric emergencies, safe water and hygiene products, and small incentives for women to start antenatal care (ANC) early.

The primary objective of this project is to develop a device to screen for substandard anti-malarials and antibiotics, thereby improving adverse maternal and neonatal health outcomes with respect to malaria and sepsis. To date, there is no device to test counterfeit and substandard drugs in the field thoroughly. To this end, we propose PharmaCheck, a user-friendly, cost-effective, contextual and high-throughput device capable of quantitatively measuring active ingredient concentration and drug release profiles to quickly and accurately screen for spurious medicines.

Micro Health Franchise System empowers community midwife worker in providing high quality and cost-effective healthcare services to mother and child in poor communities; at their door steps. Micro Health Franchise system also provides entrepreneurial support to the community midwife workers that lead to the standardization of services, access to financial services and having support by an efficient referral network that can respond to emergencies in a proactive manner. At the core of this solution lies the Telehealth module.

Erez Lieberman-Aiden and his team at Harvard University in the U.S. propose to develop a low-cost microbial fuel cell (MFC) to power cell phones in Africa. Certain naturally occurring soil microbes produce free electrons during the course of their ordinary metabolic processes, and MFCs will recharge themselves using power derived from these soil microbes. These fuel cells do not require any sophisticated materials to build, and can be easily assembled using locally available materials.

Kris Ansin of the Mali Health Organizing Project in the U.S. will work to improve the use of primary health clinics in Mali by identifying shortcomings in patients' experiences at the clinics and working with staff to address them. They have already discovered that poor patient reception and hospitality strongly deter individuals from using these clinics. They will identify more specific patient concerns and help overcome them by training staff. They will evaluate their approach by measuring patient satisfaction, clinic usage, and health outcomes.

Maria Conceicao do Rosário from Universidade Federal de São Paulo in Brazil will assess the effect of mother and teacher support programs in pre-schools in poor districts of São Paulo on the physical and emotional well-being of families, and on early childhood development. Many poor communities in Brazil suffer from high levels of urban violence and adult mental illness that affect the healthy development and well-being of children.

Mauricio Lima Barreto from Fiocruz in Brazil will evaluate the impact of social and economic inequalities, and the national family allowance program (Bolsa Familia), on healthy births and early childhood health and development. They will setup a cohort, which will be derived from a central database of named households created to support Brazil's social programs, and a data center for the analysis. They will use a variety of demographic, economic and social data on families, as well as information on births and childhood deaths, and child growth.

Sonia Isoyama Venancio from the Instituto de Saúde in Brazil will implement a program for monitoring the development of children less than five years of age during vaccination campaigns in the municipalities, to help identify risk factors, raise awareness, and support healthy development. They will design and pilot test a questionnaire that can be easily applied during a vaccination procedure to carefully query the health and behavior of the child, as well as their family environment and access to health services and education.

Alexander Green of Arizona State University in the U.S. and Keith Pardee of the University of Toronto in Canada will develop molecular technologies, hosted by cell-free systems embedded into paper, to create point-of-care diagnostics for multiple diseases at low-costs. These sensitive and specific diagnostics will remain active without refrigeration for one year, and have been demonstrated in proof-of-concept tests with the Zika virus.