Based out of The Suitcase Clinic, Artists in Residents provides a meaningful and enriching artistic outlet to Berkeley’s homeless residents, allowing participants the opportunity to grow through their art and gain compensation for their work. Through public events that showcase the artistic side of this underrepresented community, Artists in Residents will facilitate a more complex understanding of homelessness throughout the Berkeley community.
Trauma disrupts every person’s blood clotting ability to stop bleeding and remains the second leading cause of preventable death in industrialized countries. With no effective medical device to provide physicians with full blood clotting data at the site of injury, medics resort to blind dosing that carries significant risk of internal blood clotting or having no effect altogether. While deployed, injured soldiers may not receive proper treatment for up to 24 hours. In the civilian sector, patient treatment may be delayed up to 3 hours before the data can be obtained at a hospital. At Innovis Medical, the team provides health care practitioners with the tools they need to diagnose clotting dysfunction at the point-of-care with a solid-state, disposable sensor capable of operating in mobile situations.
In the US, 1 in 4 renters spend half their income on rent. City life has become increasingly unaffordable while residential spaces remain empty during the day. Meanwhile, technology is disrupting the traditional work structure leading to ever more freelancers and remote workers. The demand for flexible workspaces during the day is soaring, as expensive co-working spaces and crowded coffee shops mushroom in cities. Codi addresses the mismatch between unused residences and need for workspace. Based on a sharing-economy model, Codi allows anyone, anywhere, to run their own co-working space at home. Codi provides the first micro-rental platform of residential spaces for remote workers. Members can access reliable home offices with the amenities, the comfort and the social component they need to thrive, while creating an additional source of revenue for hosts. The Codi model promotes circular economic values and revitalizes local neighborhoods.
In developing countries, the cost to diagnose meningitis remains high and therefore many neonates are denied quality healthcare. Approximately 126,000 cases of neonatal bacterial meningitis occur every year in low income countries of which 25–50% develop brain damage and about 40-58% of patients die. The gold standard for diagnosing neonatal bacterial meningitis is a cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) culture. Lumenda provides an accurate and rapid method of diagnosing bacterial meningitis in neonates in low-resource settings. It facilitates rapid intervention and avoids wasteful prophylactic administration of antibiotics by analyzing the optical properties of the CSF to rapidly detect bacterial meningitis at each point along this pathophysiology. The rationale behind the device stems from the clinical observation that CSF turns from clear to opaque when infected with bacterial meningitis.
In Uganda, the most common type of water tap is manual, requiring a user to open and close it with their hand. If the tap is at a public water point, there is 60% chance that the person will walk away with an infection, since adherence to recommended practices, such as rinsing the tap after use is low. Other solutions like sensors are either too costly or not readily available thus preventing their wide scale adoption. PedalTap technology is modifying the existing water tap system to create a no touch cost effective solution for developing countries. We are using metal scrap which is readily available at low cost on the market. With PedalTap, reduced potent and infectious diseases spread, reduced nosocomial infections, better hand washing behaviour and reduced water wastage at water points. There is no hand contact so no risk/ fear of picking infection from the tap at public water point.
The skyrocketing popularity of dating apps like Grindr, Tinder, and Jack’d has fueled recent increases in the transmission of HIV and other STDs. This has caused great concern among dating app users as well as heightened response by the public health community. While prevention efforts have been varied, recent strategies focus on dating app-facilitated dialogue about sexual health, widespread campaigning for HIV and STD testing, and targeted HIV pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP). Yet as each approach has its drawbacks, the worry and risk of HIV/STD infection continue to grow. Our innovation, Serify, aims to reverse these trends. Developed through a fall 2016 interprofessional entrepreneurship course at UCSF, Serify allows dating app users to conveniently verify and share their negative HIV/STD test results. In this way, users can boost their sexual desirability and minimize their worry and risk of HIV/STD infection.
When Berkeley undergraduates engage in immersive research experiences, it can be one of the most transformative and fruitful adventures of their college career. Yet, many new students are deterred from even getting started. This problem stems from a tendency for programs to favor already experienced students and difficulty for new students in navigating a complex myriad of Berkeley resources. ULAB is a student-run research laboratory to help freshman and sophomores from all backgrounds and skill levels get started in research. ULAB members tour research labs to engage with the research community, they complete mini research projects to develop skills that align with their interests, and they work with junior and senior mentors to build professional networks by learning from those who succeeded before them. We are emphasizing new ways to reach underrepresented and socioeconomically disadvantaged students by partnering with the residence halls and existing organizations.
In 2015, pneumonia was the leading cause of death in patients under the age of 5, claiming almost one million children worldwide. It has been reported by UNICEF that there is a need for access to a more affordable diagnostic method to reduce the number of deaths in populations with limited access to medical infrastructure. Tabla seeks to meet this need by providing an inexpensive method of diagnosing pneumonia. The device sends sound waves into the body using a surface exciter, records acoustic backscatter with a digital stethoscope, and analyzes the received signal in order to assess the presence of pneumonia. Tabla provides an order of magnitude improvement on portability, accessibility and cost over the current gold standard of chest x-ray, targeting patients in areas with limited access to advanced medical care. The device has IRB approval at UCSF and is currently being tested with adult and pediatric patients.
The goal of this project is to develop a safe, inexpensive, and reliable self-diagnostic tool for the early detection of preeclampsia that can be accessible to pregnant women in low-resource settings, thereby reducing the detrimental health impacts of undiagnosed preeclampsia and eclampsia. The earliest indicators for developing preeclampsia are dramatically increased levels of biomarkers activin A and inhibin A in a woman’s urine. The self-diagnostic tool will be a urine strip created by adapting lateral flow assay technology to detect the levels of activin A and inhibin A in the urine of pregnant women. The test will inform the woman if she is developing preeclampsia and needs to seek medical care before her symptoms become severe and endanger the life of her and her unborn child.
Blum Center for Developing Economies
The University of California, Berkeley
bigideas@berkeley.edu
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