In 2011, the CDC reported diabetes afflicted 25.8 million people in the United States. This disease can be controlled by strict blood serum glucose level monitoring, but the gold standard fingerstick test is painful and must be done multiple times every day. The team is developing a colorimetric sensor that could provide an inexpensive, non-invasive test for determining the level of glucose in the patient’s blood, providing a painless alternative to the fingerstick testing method. By developing a novel phage matrix material and smartphone sensor analyzer, the team hopes to create a non-invasive point-of-care sensor that can identify the concentration of these compounds on the patient’s breath and accurately report the patient’s blood glucose levels.
The three main functions of the LuxWalk application are as follows. First, students can input their origin and destination on an app built into the application to find the safest route to walk, produced through an analysis of past crime data and the degree of street lighting. Second, students can also track the Night Safety shuttle and campus-funded Community Service Officers through the BearWalk program to gain estimates on when and where they can plan to dispatch a shuttle or officer. Third, students can connect to the application through their Facebook accounts, to see which friends are checked in at their location and are walking to the same geographical area. Ultimately, LuxWalk serves to connect students with information about Berkeley neighborhoods, campus-facilitated night safety programs, and fellow students in their community who can facilitate safety in numbers while traveling at night.
4.6 billion people across the developing world lack adequate treatment of their feces and urine. ElectroSan will apply electrochemical cells that recover nitrogen from human urine. This product will be used to disinfect human feces and produce income as a fertilizer, making sanitation affordable in low-income communities like Mukuru, an urban Nairobi slum. This intervention can catalytically improve public health and environmental quality by treating and creating value-added products from waste.
The Employment and Life Skills Academic Competition is a program that teaches teenagers resume writing, job interview and oral presentation skills, and financial literacy. The objective is to prepare high school students for life after graduation by not only making them competitive for the workforce but also teaching them information about managing their finances. The student participants prepare for the Academic Competition through an enriching afterschool program. A Resource Guide, which serves as an outline of the various skills and financial concepts to be mastered, is then distributed to all student participants. The Academic Competition includes four categories in which students will be evaluated as individuals or part of their high school team. The categories include an oral presentation, a mock job interview, a written essay focusing on financial literacy, and an objective section where the high school teams compete to answer financial-based questions in a game-show format.
In the 1980s, newborns with complex congenital heart disease (CCHD) began to survive past one year for the first time due to advances in cardiothoracic surgery and cardiovascular medicine. “Heart Connection” will be a website exploring what survivors of this condition experience daily, leaving evidence of how CCHD adults have been forced to reinvent and reimagine new ways of navigating the world with their tired bodies and busy minds, while creating meaning in their lives for the generations succeeding them. The project envisions three main pages. One page is for the artwork of adults with CCHD documenting their lives through audio, video, creative writing and photography. A second page is committed to inspiring and bringing hope to parents who have children with CCHD. A third page is dedicated for resources needed by CCHD adults and children to live meaningful and productive lives.
In developing countries, electricity is often a luxury. People living in off-grid communities are not able to have a refrigerator, even though it is often the appliance they want the most. By integrating energy generation, storage and use into the same appliance, Solidge, an off-grid, solar-powered refrigeration system, solves grid unreliability by simply not using the grid. Solidge users can safely store food, unsold crops and vaccines for longer periods of time. Solidge will directly increase off-grid communities’ health and overall lifestyle by providing them with an affordable refrigerator. Solidge will first deploy in Morocco, taking advantage of the region’s sun and accessibility, as well as gather user feedback and refine Solidge’s design. However, Solidge has a broader mission. Designed from the ground up to become a globally deployable unit, Solidge will provide off-grid refrigeration for developing and developed countries alike.
The Adelante youth empowerment center will work with at-risk teens from Mexico who are academically demotivated or who have few resources available to them. It will motivate and empower them, supporting young professionals to be agents of change in their communities. The summer program centers will provide teens and communities with a safe haven dedicated to the professional advancement of youth and the development of Mexican communities. The franchise method of providing these centers throughout Mexico will identify local community youth and Mexican college students to lead the center in subsequent years, while the work on the expansion of Adelante youth centers across Mexico continues.
Mapping Waterways will create a participatory mapping system that involves all aspects of the mapping process: from data collection, to map input, to visualization and organization. The mapping project will incorporate government and community-collected data to bridge current water mapping endeavors. This meets the need to integrate data analysis with community participation and improves access to water-quality information, which communities can then use for political projects. The project will require a collaborative process to implement participatory mapping, and to generate the necessary data to launch the online organizational interface. The team will visit three communities in the summer of 2014 to train and pilot the community data collection process. The data will then be uploaded to a web interface to add local context and community control to the mapping process. This will provide community groups with information on water quality and its impact on local areas that otherwise might require funding for specialists. This web interface stands to save groups in underserved areas funding and time in their efforts secure water rights.
This team’s faculty advisors received CITRIS seed funding this year to investigate the activity patterns of older persons living alone, and simultaneously, the capabilities of various sensors such as cameras, temperature sensor, and a two-way microphone for remote monitoring by family members. The goal of this CITRIS funding is for family members or their surrogates to remotely control a robot system over the Internet when they suspect a problem or are unable to reach their loved ones by phone. The goal of this Big Ideas proposal is to make this system autonomous, enabling the robot to monitor activity by detecting utility pattern anomalies. This will allow the system to identify and indicate potential problems and then alert the family members, while heading towards the location of the last utility activity. This project will use a commercially available vacuum robot, “Roomba,” as the base, allow for two-way communication using a mounted tablet, integrate a thermal camera for health data, and analyze the data for the surrogate to inspect and take the appropriate actions.
