App/Software

Jennifer Griffin of RTI International in the U.S. will test whether the gestational age of infants born prematurely can be determined by combining simple physical measurements with an automated analysis of the blood vessels in the retina using the camera on a mobile phone. As the fetus develops in the womb, blood vessels in the anterior lens gradually disappear, which closely correlates with gestational age at delivery.

Simon Parrish of Development Initiatives in the United Kingdom will create a toolkit for the generation of a single interoperable dataset from diverse databases to help more users better assess the impact of resource spending in developing countries. Accurately assessing the impact of spending in areas such as health and education in specific locations, and the ability to directly compare different locations, is necessary to effectively eradicate poverty. However, the relevant datasets are currently incompatible or difficult to access by the appropriate communities.

Pushpa Singh of the Civil Society Information Services India in India will develop a common repository to receive, validate, and store information from multiple sources on not-for-profit organizations to make it easier to access support from philanthropic intermediaries. Philanthropic intermediaries currently perform independent searches to find appropriate NGO partners to support, which costs time, money, and effort.

Gisli Olafsson of NetHope Inc. in the U.S. will work to improve humanitarian information management to better inform decision-making in emergency situations, such as after a natural disaster. In a crisis situation, information on what is needed and what is being done comes from different humanitarian organizations, but these data often do not conform to universal standards or are not made generally available. She will consult experts from the private sector and incorporate best practices from different existing data standards efforts.

Vijay Modi and colleagues of Columbia University in the U.S. will create a universal database to centralize the mapping of social infrastructures, such as schools, clinics, and water points, to improve data accuracy and help to better coordinate aid efforts. Currently, data collection of physical points occurs across multiple platforms, and is inefficient and difficult to update. They will build and host a web service providing a simple database that is easy to access and edit to promote widespread adoption and thereby sharing and integration of important datasets.

Claire Adida and Jennifer Burney of the University of California, San Diego, in the U.S. are developing a mobile money platform to enable the rural poor in West Africa to pay school fees directly and securely using mobile phones to help more children stay in school. Mobile money is not widely used in West Africa and many individuals do not use banks. Often money for things like school fees has to be physically transferred over long distances, which is unreliable and takes time. Recording payments is done largely by hand, which is error-prone and difficult to track.

Blanca Jimenez Cisneros of Mexican Autonomous National University in Mexico will develop software to automatically identify and quantify parasitic helminth eggs in wastewater. The software could provide a rapid and low-cost method for untrained personnel to test wastewater before its reuse in agriculture, thereby reducing parasitic infections in local populations.

Marc Mitchell of D-Tree International in the U.S. will develop and test a mobile phone-based tool using clinical algorithms that rapidly identify women at risk during labor and delivery and facilitate emergency transfer to a hospital. The tool is a combination of phone decision support, data storage, on-line banking and communications on a single device at the point of care to improve maternal health outcomes. If successful, this tool could significantly reduce maternal mortality in low-income countries.

Traditionally, hard-to-reach rural areas show increased maternal and child mortality. In Peru, rural villages of the Amazon basin have the worst health indicators in the country and many are only accessible by medical river vessels. The under-five and maternal mortality rates are well above the national average. The Mama River Program, a maternal and newborn program for remote riverine areas in the Peruvian Amazon, wants to change this.

Mental illnesses represent the highest burden of disease globally, the most prevalent of which is depression. Depression during pregnancy and delivery is very common but usually neglected, although it negatively affects both women and babies. In developing countries, 50% of pregnant women show symptoms of depression and 10-15% have major depressive disorders. Integration of effective screening and treatment services for depression into prenatal care is critical to improving mental health of both mothers and children.