Product/Service Development

Iwnetim Abate and Loza Tadesse of SCIFRO Inc with Manu Prakash of Stanford University both in the U.S. will develop an education platform to inspire and equip African college students to solve local health problems through science using simple, inexpensive tools such as paper-based centrifuges and chemistry kits. Less than 8% of sub-Saharan Africans get to attend tertiary education, and there are limited options for pursuing a career in science. This means that even with the recent rise in inexpensive scientific equipment, many local problems of Africans remain unsolved.

Yasmin Chandani of inSupply Health Limited and Pratap Kumar of Health-E-net Limited both in Kenya will develop a simple digital health tool to support the maternal and child health supply chains for low-literate, nomadic communities spread sparsely across Kenya. Counties in semi-arid lands have poor maternal and child health indicators caused by vast distances, low literacy rates, no fixed health facilities, and no data on supply chains.

Justin Lessler of the International Vaccine Access Center, Baltimore of the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health in the U.S. and Anthony Ahumibe of Nigeria Centre for Disease Control in Nigeria will launch a West African disease surveillance network for cholera to leverage local pathogen genome sequencing efforts for disease control and ultimately elimination.

Rudolph Gleason of Georgia Institute of Technology in the U.S. and Abebbaw Fekadu of CDT-Africa in Ethiopia will develop a low-cost, wearable device that wirelessly monitors the vital signs of neonates in low-resource settings to help lower mortality rates. In Ethiopia, and many other regions, the leading causes of neonatal deaths are respiratory distress, infection, and asphyxia.

The Institute for Policy Studies in the U.S. will build on their pilot project with Reverend Barber's Poor People's Campaign by working with low-income individuals to translate their stories into widely distributed op-eds. The Institute for Policy Studies will provide data and support to help impacted people from diverse backgrounds and geographical areas to craft compelling op-eds to bring the public's and policymakers' attention to the structural and historical barriers to economic mobility and in demanding policy action to confront those barriers.

Robert Miros of 3rd Stone Design, Inc. in the U.S. will adapt their portable vaccine refrigerator, which is battery powered and can be monitored remotely, to maximize the charge life so that it can support vaccination campaigns in low- and middle-income countries. Vaccines are normally stored in ice boxes and manually tracked, both of which are unreliable and can cause spoiling. Their vaccine refrigerator integrates thermo-electricity cooling and battery power together with an algorithm that can sense temperature and adjust it according to the available power.

Mosokah Fallah of the National Public Health Institute of Liberia will provide health campaign staff with activity tracking devices and movement-based bonuses to encourage more accurate reporting of coverage to improve impact. There have been large inconsistences between the reported and actual numbers of drugs and vaccines administered during health campaigns in Liberia. This may be due to the lack of motivation and accountability of health campaign staff.

Laura Smith of Research Foundation for the State University of New York in the U.S. will develop a decision-making tool that can plan more effective health campaigns in low- and middle-income countries by considering any competing interests of stakeholders. Health campaigns involve many different government and private stakeholders with differing interests.

Simon Mutembo of the Macha Research Trust in Zambia will develop a method to identify and map children who have never received vaccinations so that they can be targeted during mass vaccination campaigns. Many of these children live in remote areas and are missed by population estimates. Their method combines field work by community health workers with spatial intelligence using a geospatial application on smart phones to develop geographical maps of vaccination coverage at the household level. Households with low or no vaccinations can then be targeted directly by campaign health workers.

Bioceptive aims to expand access to long-acting reversible contraception (LARC) for the estimated 222 million women around the world with an unmet need for modern family planning resources. The discreet intrauterine device (IUD) is one of the most applicable LARC methods for global use due to its long term of use, high efficacy, and minimal user effort. However, IUD access is frequently limited because the insertion procedure is complicated and only carried out by highly trained physicians.