Loccasion is a smartphone application that uses geo-fence technology to make the interactions between campus organizations and students more effective and sustainable. This application is intended to improve the way students receive information about clubs and groups that they are interested in because up until now, the distribution of flyers on Sproul Plaza is passive, inefficient and unintuitive. The goal of the Loccasion project is to streamline the process for campus promoters to disseminate information to a relevant audience. The team’s solution is to equip student organizations with a smartphone tool that can create events and announcements that are interactive and engaging. The user interface provides a framework for creating events – such as date, time, directions to venue and the ability to upload photos – enabling a simple way for organizations to create announcements and spread them to their targeted audience within a matter of seconds. Upon the creation of an event, a circular virtual fence with a certain radius around the student promoter’s smartphone is set up. Anyone who has installed the app on their phone can receive notifications once within the virtual border. Event organizers can tag their postings with certain keyword hash tags such as #engineering or #entertainment and users can subscribe to certain keywords to receive a stream of events on their smartphones.
EMS: Shirati was founded by four Cal seniors in collaboration with the Shirati KMT Hospital in Tanzania and Bay Area NGO AISCS. The team aims to expand upon the the hospital’s Emergency Medical System (EMS), which some of the team members helped establish in 2009. The current objective is to reduce maternal mortality throughout the region of Rorya by working with TBAs and introducing a motorcycle ambulance system. The goal of EMS: Shirati is for community volunteers to train nurses in local hospitals basic Emergency Medicine, specifically for obstetric emergencies and to expand the EMS (Emergency Medical System). The team’s solution is the MedBike, a modified motorbike with a sidecar addition designed to provide safe transportation for pregnant women to reduce maternal mortality. The MedBike will be operated by community volunteers and nurses and will be able to access areas not accessible by cars and ambulances, where the majority of the population of Tarime lives. This will streamline access to medical care in emergency situations, allowing healthcare providers to come to the patient and provide care until they get to a doctor, significantly increasing survival rates.
As the number of aging Americans increases over the next 40 years, clinicians, city planners, government employees, program administrators and caregivers are ill-equipped to do much more than help Baby Boomers maintain their health as they age. The need for innovative thinking, discourse, and practice in the field of aging is at an all-time high. There is a desperate need for multi-generational and crosscultural community dialogue geared toward giving a meaningful purpose to the lives of elderly people. “Vibrant Aging” aims to produce a series of short films which will be used to catalyze much-needed community discussions about the future of aging in America. These discussions will stem from reactions to the short films, which spotlight culturally-diverse and often-underserved populations of older adults
in America. Documenting older adults and their collective wisdom and expertise of what it means to age “vibrantly” will empower not only them, but the hundreds of older adults, caregivers, practitioners, and students who will watch the films.
Pioneers in Engineering (PiE) will begin a year-round mentorship program for UC Berkeley students to share their passion about Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) with Bay-Area high school students and inspire them to pursue higher education in STEM fields. In the fall, Berkeley students from PiE will interact with students at targeted underprivileged high schools. This one-on-one mentoring program will include weekly meetings where high school students will learn about STEM majors through modules involving project-driven, hands-on activities. In the spring, the project activities will culminate with the design and construction of a robot for the 5th annual PiE robotics competition. Many of these students will be the first in their families to attend college, and will receive class tutoring, college application assistance, and career opportunity exploration. Cal students in PiE will be trained to serve as mentors and role models so they can directly handle the challenges in our education system and their protégés’ daily lives.
Diarrheal disease from drinking unsafe water is one of the leading causes of death in Mexico. Today, millions of Mexicans in low-income communities are still at high risk of waterborne diseases because of inadequate water infrastructure and insufficient water quality control. In particular, safe water remains unavailable to those who cannot afford commercially sold bottled water. Water technology like the UV Tube, developed through collaboration between UC Berkeley and Fundacion Cantaro Azul, is an effective means to secure water quality at home. Nuestra Agua, a new social franchise designed by UC Berkeley students, will expand on the UV Tube project and offer a local, affordable, and reliable option for people who need to purchase safe water as well as an economic opportunity for local entrepreneurs.
The E-du-waste project focuses on Guiyu, China, the largest electronic waste dumping ground in the world and provides an approach to help the people who are forced to rummage through E-waste for survival. The project will focus on educating middle school students in Guiy by organizing an Englishlanguage summer day-camp over 5 days for middle schools in Guiyu. The aim of the camp is to equip the local students with critical thinking skills and to help them gain insights on global environmental issues through education in Art, Film and Science. The process will be filmed and made available to recycling centers as possible publicity material. The goal is to motivate students in Guiyu to seek higher education and avoid harmful E-waste recycling jobs in the future.
Vuwa seeks to combat poor farming yields, low income and the declining living standards due to the high cost of water in Kenya. The Vuwa Enterprise has designed a scalable shower water drip irrigation system capable of irrigating cash crops for farmers in Kenya and other developing countries. The product sells at an affordable 1483 shillings and can be made even more affordable through Vuwa Enterprise’s lending models. The Shower Water Drip Irrigation System consists of a platform that is installed in a customer’s bath area. During bucket showers the water falls through the platform and is caught in the black plastic tarp and will flow into bottles that connect to drip irrigation tape leading to nearby crops. All components of the system can be bought in local rural Kenyan markets.
In collaboration with a U.S. based, Kenyan registered, 501c3 non-profit, called the Organic Health Response, a team of interdisciplinary UCSF, UCB, and University of Minnesota undergraduate and graduate students coming from a range of different departments including, but not limited to: medicine, environmental science, architecture, and anthropology have created a hyper efficient bio-dynamic aquaponic farming system to be built on the remote island of Mfangano, located in Nyanza Province of western Kenya. This project is to be realized during the summer of 2011 with the help of local artisans, farmers, and builders,and a group of students from UCB and UCSF. The continued iniative of the Organic Health Response and this group of students to find alternative forms treatment to the staggering prevelence of HIV/AIDS in the region prompted the need to create reliable, sustainable, economically viable, and highly efficient food production systems to turn the tide against HIV/AIDS in this region of the world.
Otitis Media (OM), more commonly known as a severe ear infection, is a medical condition that is caused by a variety of pathogens and affects 70% of all children under the age of three. Currently, most ear infections are treated with multiple rounds of antibiotics. With the onset of antibiotic-resistant pathogens, this type of treatment may be inefficient, costly, and time consuming. A more effective treatment is known as Tympanocentesis, a medical procedure used for diagnosing and treating ear infections. The need for the procedure is rising along with emerging bacterial resistance, but no fully-integrated device for administering the treatment exists. Current methods involve using a spinal needle tap, fed through the viewing window of an otoscope, to puncture the ear drum, which is an extremely unstable process and is oftentimes avoided by pediatricians. This project will develop a novel, single-handed, integrated, and ergonomic device that can perform tympanocentesis with existing disposable materials commonly found at the doctor’s office.
