Product/Service Development

Aleta Williams of FHI Partners LLC in the U.S. will design, build, and test a mobile, digital tally counter for community drug distributors to accurately record data during mass drug administration campaigns for neglected tropical diseases in rural and deprived communities. Currently, these data are generally captured on paper, which is inefficient, prone to errors, and difficult to share.

Amanda Odum of the Research Triangle Institute in the U.S. will develop a mobile Application, TraceRX, to record and track drugs donated to mass drug administration campaigns in Nigeria to ensure the right drugs are in the right place at the right time. Donated drugs are currently monitored by paper methods, basic software programs, or local pharmacists, which leads to inaccurate ordering, expired drugs, and stockouts.

Justin Cohen of the Clinton Health Access Initiative Inc in the U.S. will develop a user-friendly electronic data collection tool using an open source platform and spatial intelligence to better monitor mass drug administration campaigns in schools and in the community. Their platform integrates population mapping with field data collection processes to accurately calculate intervention coverage, such as the distribution of bed-nets or administered drugs, in near real-time.

To utilise a mobile enabled Geographic Information System (GIS) technology and an embedded point-based reward system/application to track faecal sludge management (FSM) patterns among waste entrepreneurs and subsequently inform issuing of incentives and subsidies to them. The incentives and subsidies will be issued based on the volume of faecal sludge emptied. The reward system will comprise integration of a point-based incentive system and a micro-loan as well as a non- cash incentive that facilitates day to day business running requirements needed for safe pit emptying.

To apply Information and Communication Technology (ICT) to develop and test a pollution monitoring and management system which will connect community- based Pollution Control Officers and local government to effectively drive change in municipal responses to incidents of water pollution. The project will focus on rapid identification of sources of faecal and solid waste pollution sources that affect water quality and subsequently human health.

To use digital water Automatic Teller Machine (ATM) dispensers and electronically rechargeable water ATM cards to improve access to sustainable and affordable clean water in poor peri-urban cities in DRC. This innovation will help reduce queuing times and gender-based violence against women and children who are normally obliged to walk at specific times in the early mornings or late evenings to access water points.

This project intends to establish a platform for colonization and mass infection of Nyssorhynchus darlingi, the primary vector in almost every state in the Amazon region and one of the more efficient vectors in the process of Plasmodium spp transmission. The establishing of a mass breeding colony of the main malaria vector in Brazil in the laboratory is extremely necessary and represents a primary condition for the development of malaria research in a multidisciplinary context.

Eric Reiter of the Institut National de Recherche pour l’Agriculture, l’Alimentation et l’Environnement (INRAE) in France will engineer nanobody-based biologicals to block ovulation as a practical, non-hormonal contraceptive with fewer side effects. Blocking the molecular regulators of ovulation is an attractive contraceptive mechanism. However, it can also affect steroid hormone production, which causes undesirable side-effects. Nanobodies are antigen-binding domains of antibodies that can very selectively modulate signal transduction pathways.

The project aims to solve the problem of a large number of low-weight births in the Indian population and the inability to predict the risk reliably in the antenatal period. The study plan goes beyond finding a single metric or rule aiming to describe the risk of Small-for-Gestational Age (SGA) in all women plan to use clustering with factor-selection on the various available data-sets. They will use algorithm development and in Bayesian modelling.

Datasets within the purview of HBGDKi with data on duration of breastfeeding, anthropometric measurements, and socio-demographic characteristics will be extracted, compiled and harmonized. WAZ, WHZ and HAZ scores will be calculated for each child. The study may describe the breastfeeding patterns in individual studies using a survival analysis approach and overall through a meta-analytic approach.