Infant Warmer

Unable to self-regulate their body temperatures, babies are especially vulnerable to cold conditions. Left untreated, hypothermia can be fatal or lead to complications that result in diabetes, heart disease, or low intelligence.

For the most susceptible 20 million low birth-weight babies who are born every year, Embrace’s infant warmer promises far reaching relief. At 1% of the cost of an incubator, the infant warmers are small, lightweight, and designed to penetrate rural markets and operate effectively once there. Life-saving warmth is generated by a removable wax interior that can be heated, without electricity, to 98°F.

Embrace’s Infant warmer is a winner of an Index award in the “Body Category,” and was featured on ABC News’ Be the Change: Save a Life.

The Doctor Comes to You

Model telemedicine programs, like the USAID Grand Challenge Award-winning E-Health Point centers in India, demonstrate technology’s unique ability to transcend physical distance and bring the resources of urban areas to remote villages through wireless connectivity.

At the 2011 Pacific Health Summit, Craig Mundie, Chief Research & Strategy Officer, Microsoft Corporation, showcased how the increasingly affordable technology found in Microsoft’s Kinect gaming system can help address the vexing problem of having too few doctors in the developing world. In a Special Presentation, he demonstrated how the Kinect can allow doctors to virtually diagnose, treat, and advise patients who would otherwise have no recourse to medical assistance.

Mosquito Swan Song

Nets blockade advancing mosquitoes, neem oil lights deter them, but what if the next anti-malaria device could systematically eliminate the vector itself? A laser gun by Intellectual Ventures aims to do just that.

A team of scientists at the Intellectual Ventures laboratory have built a machine that tracks and destroys only female, malaria-carrying mosquitoes with targeted laser strikes.

The Intellectual Ventures team is currently engaged in studies of cost-effectiveness to see how the device might be brought to, and effectively utilized in, Africa.

Open Source E-care in the
Developing World

In rugged outposts of developing world countries, community health workers (CHW) often operate with no means to catalog and share the vast reserves of health information they accumulate on their daily visits to rural homes.

A potential remedy lays in Dimagi’s CommCare, an open source software program for mobile phones that is easily customizable across languages, and cell phone platforms and brands. CommCare provides previously solitary CHWs with access to a wide pool of resources including registration forms, checklists, danger sign monitoring, and educational prompts. The software also allows them to export on-the-ground findings to a cloud service that aggregates the data for health surveillance and shared study.

CommCare is being piloted in ten countries and has collected forms from over 90,000 home visits.

P is for Paper:
Innovative Diagnostics

Intensive HIV and TB drug regimens that save millions of lives each year can also cause high strain on the livers that process them.

Diagnostics for All has developed a piece of paper patterned with water-resistant channels that guide urine, blood, sweat, or other bodily fluids to an assay point that reveals liver toxicity levels. Cheap, reliable, ubiquitous, and easily disposable, the device is a game-changer in the capacity to monitor liver function in the developing world.

XoutTB, an MIT program, also creatively uses paper diagnostics, along with mobile phones, to incentivize adherence to lengthy TB drug regimens. Each month, TB patients are given a container of paper strips. One strip dispenses every 24 hours. When a patient urinates on the strip, a combination of numbers on the strip will change color if TB drugs are detected. The code is then relayed to health workers, and if it proves TB drug adherence, the patient is rewarded with a mobile phone minutes package.

Health Information Technology in Zambia

In Zambia, a nationwide rollout of the SmartCare Electronic Health Records System has served the dual purpose of streamlining patient care and allowing health officials and clinicians to observe health trends and allocate resources accordingly.

Developed in Zambia and endorsed by its Ministry of Health, SmartCare is the largest deployment of electronic health records in Africa. Each client of the system carries a credit card-sized plastic license with a SIM card that holds the patient's history. When presented at a check-up, clinicians can consult the data to provide more targeted care. A health record is generated and then collected for viewing at local, regional, and national levels so that health workers can make targeted decisions. Importantly, the card has allowed for increased access to ARV drugs and information regarding HIV trends.

Ramping up from a small pilot project in Zambia’s Kafoue District, SmartCare now operates in all nine districts and 72 provinces of the country, and also has a presence in Ethiopia and South Africa.

PATH Birthweigh Scale

PATH International has developed a new BIRTHweigh scale that helps low literacy health workers in the developing world identify underweight newborns. The scale compensates for low-literacy rates by providing pictorial instructions for use, and is designed for local production and distribution to reduce costs to users. Once an underweight newborn is identified, the infant can be given immediate care such as breastfeeding and warming, or higher levels of medical care.

Many babies in the developing world—where 95% of underweight children are born—are delivered at home. Oftentimes, traditional birth attendants and midwives lack the training and tools to identify underweight children. The PATH BIRTHweigh scale offers a means to tackling this enormous public health problem.

Currently, PATH is seeking a manufacturer to whom the technology can be transferred, so that the scale can be readily available to community health workers who care for infants.

Micronutrient Initiative (MI) Project Rewarded

In May 2007 the Micronutrient Initiative won a World Bank Development Marketplace Award for a project that helps village millers in Nepal add essential vitamins and minerals to the cereal flour they produce. In Nepal, where 78% of children under the age of five and three-quarters of women are anemic, the addition of key nutrients is improving health and productivity of rural Nepalese by decreasing iron deficiency anemia.

The project relies on a flour device that was introduced to small traditional watermills in the Lalitpur District of Nepal. The device, which does not require electricity, automatically adds correct doses of nutrients to grain being milled. It was developed by the Micronutrient Initiative with funding from the Canadian International Development Agency.

Harvard Spray Vaccine

Bioengineers and public health researchers have developed a new spray method for preserving and delivering the most common TB vaccine. The low-cost and scalable technique is viewed as a step up from conventional vaccination procedures because it offers greater stability at room temperature and is needle-free in its delivery. Currently, the widely administered Bacillus Calmette-Guerin (BCG) vaccine is stored through a cumbersome freezing process and delivered by needle injection.

The spray-drying technique, developed by researchers from the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, could one day provide a better approach for vaccination against TB. The project was sponsored in part by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and a grant from the National Institutes of Health.

To access the official article, please visit the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences press releases.

Aravind Eye Hospitals

Given the magnitude of blindness and the challenges faced in many developing countries, the government alone cannot meet the health needs of all. Realizing this predicament, Dr. G. Venkataswamy established an alternative healthcare model in 1976—the GOVEL Trust to initiate eye care work—that would supplement the efforts of the government and also be self-supporting. Summit 2007 participant Padma Shri Dr. P. Namperumalsamy is the current Aravind Chairman. Under this Trust, the Aravind Eye Hospitals were founded. Today, Aravind is more than an eye hospital. It is also: