Students Win Grant for Cell Phone Project to Detect Famine
FrontLines - February 2009
A team of Columbia University graduate students won a $10,000 grant from USAID in the Agency’s first competition for innovators who use cell phones and other mobile technology
to advance development.
The Columbia team hopes to teach health workers in Malawi and other developing countries to work with the Ministry of Health and the U.N. Children’s Fund to use cell phones to collect
height and weight data, said Kirsten Bokenkamp, one of the students with the winning
project, RapidSMS Child Malnutrition Surveillance.
This information—which can determine if famine or malnutrition
is occurring—is then sent by text message to Ministry of Health offices in the main cities of the country. Previously such data was collected on paper and mailed in, delaying data collection
by days or weeks.
“RapidSMS text messages have been used for inventory but never for health and nutrition
data,” said Bokenkamp.
The announcement of the winner was made Jan. 8 in a ceremony held at the Newseum in Washington.
The two runners-up—who each received $5,000 grants—were ClickDiagnostics and Ushahidi v.2.
ClickDiagnostics trains health workers in rural Bangladesh, Egypt, and other countries to use cell phones to take photos of patients with skin diseases, eye maladies, and other visible conditions. The phones are programmed to prompt the health worker to
ask a series of questions of the patient that help a physician determine the illness. Both the photo and the patient responses are sent by phone to doctors in nearby cities who then provide a diagnosis and prescribe treatment
otherwise not available to the rural poor.
Ushahidi, which means “testimony”
in Swahili, used text messaging from witnesses to tribal violence in Kenya to draw up a map of danger zones people should avoid. That map was then made available to media to help the public stay safe. The system also is working
in Gaza and the Congo.
The three winners were among 115 projects submitted to an online competition, with the public invited to log on and offer feedback.
Other projects which
were not among the top three included: solar-powered refrigerators
to store perishable medicine,
and a call center for research to prevent the sale
of counterfeit goods. Further information on these projects is at www.globaldevelopmentcommons.net.
The competition, called the Development 2.0 Challenge, was developed by USAID’s Global Development Commons.
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