With more than 1 billion people already living in slums worldwide, concerns for a safe and habitable shelter are growing rapidly. A good roofing system is essential for adequate shelter, but unfortunately it is highly neglected, largely owing to insufficient options in the market. The team’s solution consists of two parts: (a) a unique material mix from recycled and natural materials; and (b) a self-developed manufacturing process to convert the mix to roofing panels. While these have been successfully developed at the prototype scale, the challenge lies in scaling up the manufacturing process while keeping the roof panels at low cost. To make the product available to families living in inadequate housing, the team needs to design a new method to streamline the manufacturing process and develop a marketing and sales strategy that will attract customers, investors and key partners.
The goal is to build an intuitive website that will use public and crowd sourced data to depict the real willingness to pay for housing by city/street/zip and in real time. The system will allow property owners to electronically collect short profiles of prospective renters, including their monthly income, credit score, references and willingness to pay. Once a property owner has accepted a submission, the remaining submissions would receive a summarized feedback loop of how their submission varied and an eventual recommendation of where to focus their search based on overall area trends.
Dropsense is developing a convenient, affordable hypoglycemia alert system to help diabetics better monitor their glucose levels. The technology comprises a sensor patch, mobile application, and machine learning analytics platform. The non-invasive Dropsense sensor sends data wirelessly to a smartphone, where a mobile app continuously processes the data with the machine learning algorithm to accurately identify hypoglycemic events. The app alerts users with an alarm or emergency phone call upon detecting low glucose levels so it can be treated before it becomes dangerous.
CloudCreations will be the platform through which innovative and effective educational tools can work together simultaneously and seamlessly. This platform is for students to collaborate, create, and compete. The collaboration will occur inside and outside the classroom and will be customized for students depending on whether or not they are in class and what they are specifically collaborating on with their friends and classmates. The creation will occur mostly outside the classroom where students will be able to vote on the most useful resources submitted by students. The platform will allow students to create videos, infographics, example problems, helpful scenarios, problem solution walkthroughs, etc.
Anti-malarial pills are among the most highly counterfeited drugs in Africa. Malaria kills between 1 and 3 million people every year, with 90% of those deaths in Africa. This reduces productivity in Africa by $12 billion and devastates local economies. The project aims to identify counterfeit anti-malarial drugs by developing a new technique to detect the concentration of artemisinin (the active ingredient) in these pills. Due to the prevalence of counterfeit drugs that have minimal amounts of this active ingredient, identifying its concentration in a pill has become important. The innovative aspect of this technique Spot-It!, is that it achieves the challenging task of measuring the concentration of active ingredient by combining two elementary methods, Thin Layer Chromatography (TLC) and a simple chemical reaction.
The causes of child stunting, a nutritional status indicator defined as poor height for weight, include inadequate caloric intake, low protein consumption (particularly of animal source protein), frequent diarrheal illness, and poor nutrient absorption in the gut due to chronic latent infection. Probiotic supplements, paired with an adequate diet, are a promising strategy for addressing child stunting. This project aims to promote the feeding of safely prepared yogurt to children between 6 months and 5 years of age in households throughout Bajura. Local women’s expertise in dahi production and child feeding will determine the best methods of efficiently and safely producing high quality yogurt, and prepare it with locally available fruits so that children enjoy the taste. These “best practices” will then be disseminated throughout the district at the monthly mother’s group meetings.
InversionParaTodos.com.ar is a web based educational platform that will provide a set of tools that help individuals to manage debt, savings, public benefits, investments and other money related issues more effectively. The platform will target four million individuals from Argentina, between the ages of 20 and 40, who come from a low and middle class background, and who have access to the internet. These educational resources will take a holistic approach, including interactive graphs, tables, video lessons, and even live lessons with an instructor via the Skype API. The easy to use interactive platform will allow users to discover how inflation affects their personal assets and exposes them to liabilities. The main tool will allow users to enter their financial information, overlay different projections, and recommend an adequate course of action. The overall goal is to help people improve their personal finance knowledge and protect their savings against inflation. As a result, they will improve their economic status in the long term.
Traditional lithium-ion batteries are produced at an increasing rate and each year at the end of their lives, they introduce over a hundred million pounds of chemical waste into the environment. The project’s main objectives are to develop a supercapacitor that serves as an energy storage alternative to traditional mobile device batteries and to create a paradigm shift in how people understand energy storage. The project aims to engineer an energy storage alternative that can be manufactured with little to no impact on the environment, produce a nominal amount of chemical waste, be fully charged in seconds and supply power for long periods of time.
Reach! is a summer leadership camp for Tibetan teenage girls to empower them to become the first female graduates of high school and college in their communities. The plan is to train top Chinese university students to serve as camp counselors for teenage girls from the Tibetan plateau. In the process, they will gain exposure to Tibetan cultural education in order to bridge the deeply polarized Han Chinese and Tibetan communities. This also establishes a valuable network of leaders for Tibetan girls to have access to in the process of pursuing their education.
