Tool/Machine

Yoshio Okada of Boston Children's Hospital in the U.S. will develop a non-invasive technique to measure the brain activity of fetuses in pregnant women in order to detect abnormalities. Current methods suffer from noise contamination and lack of sensitivity. Their new method involves a dual array of magnetic sensors placed around the entire torso of the mother and will be evaluated for its ability to discriminate fetal brain signals from noise.

Zilma Reis of Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais in Brazil will develop a portable device to measure epidermal properties of the skin and evaluate its ability to determine gestational age in newborns. The skin epidermis is known to change during fetal development. They will exploit a non-invasive optical technique called photoelectric plethysmography that characterizes a material by analyzing its effect on the properties of an LED light shone on it.

Peter von Dadelszen of St George's, University of London, in the United Kingdom will develop a simple, smartphone-based mobile ultrasound device that can be used by untrained healthcare professionals in low-resource settings to determine gestational age by measuring the diameter of the fetal cerebellum. Accurate dating in pregnancy is important for the health of the mother and child. They will develop an automated image analysis protocol for smartphones that can recognize and measure the fetal cerebellum and an associated application that then estimates gestational age.

Nishant Kumar of Embryyo Technologies Private Limited will develop a head scanner that can determine the weight and volume of the brain of a newborn to help monitor health. Current methods rely on expensive or complex techniques that require trained staff. They will develop a portable imaging scanner and a mattress that can measure the weight of the head, and use them to render a 3D mesh volume template of the head. This template can then be used to compute brain volume and weight by subtracting known volumes of bone and dermal tissues.

John Spencer of the University of East Anglia in the United Kingdom along with Sean Deoni of the University of Colorado in the U.S. are assessing the trajectory of brain development during the first two years of age using a range of imaging, physiological and behavioral assessment tools to understand how development is affected by environmental factors such as nutrition, stress, and parent-child interaction.

Catherine Poulsen of Electrical Geodesics, Inc. in the U.S. will develop a protocol based on electroencephalography for the automated measurement of functional connectivity networks in the infant brain in order to predict the development of neurological defects. Functional connectivity networks such as emotion, memory, and language begin developing during gestation, and defects are linked with disorders including ADHD and depression. However, measuring functional networks requires magnetic resonance imaging, which is expensive and problematic for use on infants.

Mark Kendall of the University of Queensland in Australia will design and test nanopatches, small patches consisting of microscopic silicon projections coated with a malaria vaccine in dry form, to target immunologically-sensitive cells within the skin's outer layers - that are missed by the needle and syringe - to induce unique and protective immune response against the disease.

Alberto Bilenca of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel will develop a cell phone imaging system that can non-invasively detect malaria parasites in the blood. The system uses a polarized red laser pointer to illuminate tissue such as a finger tip, and a zoom lens and polarizing filter on existing cell phone cameras, to create images that depict hemozoin crystals in blood following malaria parasite infection, as well as micro-obstructions in the circulatory system that result from the infection.

Krijn Paaijmans of the Barcelona Institute for Global Health in Spain will produce a sticky, electrically-charged net to trap a representative sample of live mosquitoes for estimating population structures and infection rates, which is needed for implementing control approaches. Current traps are often designed to sample mosquitoes at specific physiological stages such as egg-laying or when they are searching for food. They will electrostatically charge the netting and coat it with a range of adhesives, colors and patterns and test their ability to attract mosquitoes in the laboratory.

Noel Elman of GearJump Technologies in the U.S. will produce a biodegradable device that can be used outdoors for the controlled release of pesticides and mosquito repellants in a defined area. Current methods for reducing malaria transmission by chemically targeting mosquitoes are quite crude and can cause widespread or prolonged exposure of the human population to toxic chemicals.