Cell-All: Super Smartphones Sniff Out Suspicious Substances. Crowdsourcing cell phones to detect dangerous chemicals Years ago, if you wanted to take a picture, you needed a dedicated camera. You needed to buy batteries for it, keep it charged, learn its controls, and lug it around. Today, chances are your cell phone is called a “smartphone” and came with a three-to-five megapixel lens built-in—not to mention an MP3 player, GPS, or even a bar code scanner. This Swiss Army knife trend represents the natural progression of technology—as chips become smaller and more advanced, cell phones continue to absorb new functions. The Cell-All initiative may be one such savior. How would this wizardry work? When a threat is sensed, a virtual ah-choo! While the first warning is beamed to individuals—a grandmother taking a siesta or a teenager hiking through the woods—the second warning works best with crowds.
Currently, if a person suspects that something is amiss, he might dial 9-1-1, though behavioral science tells us that it’s easier to do nothing. CelloPhone | Vodafone Wireless Innovation Project. Electrical Engineering Department, UCLA Dr. Aydogan Ozcan, Dr. Neven Karlovac, Dr. Yvonne Bryson In resource limited settings, such as in the villages of Africa, there is no infrastructure to conduct even very simple medical tests such as blood counts.
To combat various infectious diseases such as malaria and HIV there is an urgent need to be able to analyze bodily fluids such as whole blood samples in a cost-effective and simple way that can even be conducted by minimally trained personnel. For such blood tests to be performed in the field, we need wireless technologies that can capture the micro-scale signatures of various blood cells even at resource poor settings. The CelloPhone Project aims to develop a transformative solution to these global challenges by providing a revolutionary optical imaging platform that will be used to specifically analyze bodily fluids within a regular cell phone. Project Site: Mobile phones: Sensors and sensitivity. Nokia app powers portable brain scanner - tech - 16 September 2011.
YOU can now hold your brain in the palm of your hand. For the first time, a scanner powered by a smartphone will let you monitor your neural signals on the go. By hooking up a commercially available EEG headset to a Nokia N900 smartphone, Jakob Eg Larsen and colleagues at the Technical University of Denmark in Kongens Lyngby have created a completely portable system. Watch a video of the app in action. This is the first time a phone has provided the power for an EEG headset, which monitors the electrical activity of the brain, says Larsen. Wearing the headset and booting up an accompanying app designed by the researchers creates a simplified 3D model of the brain that lights up as brainwaves are detected, and can be rotated by swiping the screen.
"Traditionally, in order to do these kind of EEG measurements you have big lab set-ups that are really expensive," says Larsen. New Scientist Not just a website! More From New Scientist The dream maker: My app shaped their slumbers (New Scientist) TB & HIV Treatment Compliance. TB & HIV Treatment Compliance One of the great challenges in HIV management programmes is ensuring HIV and TB treatment compliance.
The effectiveness of HIV and TB treatment hinges on patient adherence to treatment programmes. Computainer provide HIV and TB treatment compliance systems and services to ensure that medicines are taken as prescribed, and ensure that your HIV treatment programmes are as successful as possible. Our compliance services, set out below, rely on cellular technology to deliver HIV and TB treatment adherence messaging and reminders. Furthermore, HIV and TB treatment compliance data is collected to evaluate programme compliance and success. SIMmed Generate your own heart beat. If you still forget, after we have reminded you, as an option, we can send a text message to a friend or family member's phone, who can then personally remind you to take your treatment.
Data on levels of treatment compliance as measured by the device are stored for future analysis and use. Mobile Learning Toolkit - Jenni Parker. Five Practical Mobile Learning Tips. CHI2010a. About the project « Yoza Project. Why Mobile? | Grameen Foundation. Since 2003, Grameen Foundation has been designing and delivering mobile solutions that address the critical needs of the poor. Mobile phones reach more than 4 billion people in the developing world, making mobile the most promising, cost-effective channel for ensuring that poor and rural populations have financial services.
We design next-generation mobile money products, develop applications and software, and build networks that enable community-based shops and distributors to serve as banking agents. AppLab Incubator The AppLab Incubator, headquartered in Uganda, is our innovation lab for testing and scaling the next generation of breakthrough products and services that are tailored to meet the needs and interests of the poor. We help private sector partners understand the characteristics and needs of the poor and also help build, test and deliver solutions into the hands of users in some of the poorest regions in the world.
Mobile Financial Services Accelerator CARD Bank, Philippines. Mobiles4Dev | Using mobile technology to advance international development.
Build it Kenny, and they will come... Want to help spread the mobile message? By kiwanja If you’re interested in technology – in particular the human face of technology in international development – have excellent writing and research skills, and want to develop our presence on the National Geographic website, then we might have the perfect opportunity for you.
For a number of years, kiwanja.net has worked hard to take the ‘mobile message’ to the masses, sharing human stories of how technology is improving lives around the world and sharing them in an accessible format with the general public. “Digital Diversity“ with National Geographic is our flagship effort, and to date we have posted dozens of stories on how different technologies, from mobile phones to solar power, are improving the lives of people everywhere. The series is very popular and has strong support from the National Geographic staff who regularly tweet and share the stories with their millions of followers. Here’s what we’re looking for: Thanks! S Blog. We are interrupting our usual programming on MobileActive.org for an important message on the future of the opennness of the Internet. C ivil society groups from around the world have signed on to an open letter to the International Telecommunication Union Secretary-General Dr.
Hamadoun Touré, objecting to the lack of openness and inclusion in recent attempts by the ITU to increase its control over the Internet. MobileActive.org is one of the signers of this letter. The background is this: In December 2012, the International Telecommunication Union will convene a meeting of the world’s governments to renegotiate the ITU’s underlying treaty, the International Telecommunications Regulations. Currently, these ITRs do not address Internet technical standards, infrastructure, or content. However, some states, notably China and Russia, are advocating for an expansion of the ITRs to include Internet regulation. 17 May 2012 To Secretary-General Dr.
Sincerely, Access Article 19 Freedom House. Mobile phones | A World Bank Blog on ICT use in Education. Last year I spent some time in Papua New Guinea (or PNG, as it is often called), where the World Bank is supporting a number of development projects, and has activities in both the ICT and education sectors. For reasons historical (PNG became an independent nation only in 1975, breaking off from Australia), economic (Australia's is by far PNG's largest export market) and geographical (the PNG capital, Port Moresby, lies about 500 miles from Cairns, across the Coral Sea), Australia provides a large amount of support to the education sector in Papua New Guinea, and I was particularly interested in learning lessons from the experiences of AusAid, the (now former) Australian donor agency.
For those who haven't been there: PNG is a truly fascinating place. "These include poor access to schools, low student retention rates and issues in the quality of education. A small research project called SMS Story has been exploring answers to this question. Ideas. Measuring What’s Working for Health Systems Strengthening: Lessons from Governance Reform By Dave Algoso // March 31, 2014 The clearest representation of healthcare is a doctor sitting with a patient. Whether it’s a routine checkup or a serious procedure, direct interaction is central to how health care happens.
If you want to improve health outcomes, this interaction is a good place to start: putting new technology in the doctor’s bag, ensuring vaccines or essential medicines reach patients, or simply building new clinics. But, of course, we know that there are hundreds of other people who make that interaction possible: diagnosticians, administrators, insurers, janitors, receptionists, truck drivers, cooks, regulators, researchers…the list is endless. The global health sector is paying increasing attention to the systems that ensure care reaches … Read More » Time to Move From Pruning Trees in Global Health to Forest Management By Dave Algoso // March 27, 2014 News March 24, 2014.
The ICT4D Jester. [The kind folks at Educational Technology Debate have posted a more sober, unjesterly version of this article.] The other day, someone the Jester will call “Shabnam” mailed him the following question: Do you have any thoughts, for or against MOOCs? Thank you, Shabnam, for waking the Jester from a long slumber. As he shakes off cobwebs, the Jester can almost hear the squeaking of his creaky bones. MOOCs – massively open online courses are all the rage these days! Before the Jester jests about the impact of MOOCs, it will help to categorize MOOCs into three categories.
The second type of MOOC is the MOOC+ (pronounced MOOC-plus). The third type of MOOC is not really a MOOC at all. The brilliance of the Jester’s classification into MOOC’EMs, MOOC+s, and OCs is that it simplifies the analysis. As always, it helps to keep in mind the Jester’s mantra: technology amplifies human intent and capacity. MOOC’EMs will certainly not solve any real problems in education. Wait, Mr.