India Smiles is a 3-year project aimed at alleviating childhood malnutrition and poor oral health outcomes caused by the transition from traditional agricultural-based diets to processed snack and “junk foods” in India. Through an effective entrepreneurial and social marketing model for community-based distribution of oral health care products and services by local community health workers, India Smiles works towards improving oral health in children ages up to age six. The project will employ oral hygiene education, application of fluoride varnish, preventative oral health care, dental examination, and distribution of toothbrushes, toothpaste and dental assistance to provide not only health benefits for mothers and children, but also financial benefits for the entrepreneurial health workers fostering a system of community involvement and sustainability.
Emmunify enables patients in the most underserved regions of developing countries to easily keep an electronic copy of their vaccination record on their cell phone. Emmunify’s electronic record allows health workers to easily identify patients, track their vaccination status, and administer the right vaccine at the right time.
This team aims to open a maternal care unit with an onsite OB/GYN in the Knights Landing community of Yolo County. Since the closing of CommuniCare in 2008, the community of approximately 750 migrant families and undocumented workers living in Knights Landing has lacked access to comprehensive health care in their community up until the beginning of this year.
The project will provide women with more birth control options, urine tests, emergency contraception, and prenatal packages. These packages would include prenatal vitamins and vouchers for transportation to hospitals in Sacramento and the greater Yolo County. The goal is to integrate community members in all steps of the process, ensuring they take an active role in their own health care and the health care of their neighbors. Que Viva La Mujer would not just be a place where women can see a gynecologist in their own community, but also their resource for all their maternal and post parturition health care and educational needs.
Haath Mein Sehat (HMS), Hindi for “Health in Hands,” is a student organization at UC Berkeley that has worked to address water, sanitation, and hygiene issues in urban slums in Mumbain and Hubli, India since 2004. Moving forward, HMS will concentrate its efforts on hand hygiene among children as a way to tackle diarrheal disease and respiratory infection—two leading causes of childhood malnutrition and mortality in India. In doing so, HMS will positively impact household livelihoods by easing the economic burden (i.e. expense of money, time, and effort) often associated with taking care of chronically ill children. (Note: This project originally won in the Big Ideas “Safe Water Enterprise” category.)
Andrew and Virginia Rudd present big ideas winners a pitch day award, April 2012.Photo credit: Blum Center
This project addresses the unmet needs of clinics serving the most at-risk populations in developing countries, where anemia is prevalent and has a great effect on treatment of other diseases. The ability to rapidly detect hemoglobin levels throughout pregnancy and during childbirth mitigates the risks associated with anemia. Working with Dr. Megan Huchko of UCSF and Nick Pearson of the non-profit Jacaranda Health, the team seeks to develop an improved method to assessing hemoglobin levels that is affordable and accessible to mobile clinics working in resource-poor areas. One current method commonly used in clinics, the WHO Hemoglobin Color Scale (HCS), uses a comparative color scale to determine hemoglobin levels. While affordable and yielding quick results, the test is based on subjective assessment from the clinician and can give inaccurate results due to variation in color interpretation and lighting. The project’s goal is to program a phone application that can measure hemoglobin concentration based on the RGB values of a digital phone image of a blood sample, allowing for the quantification of color and eliminating the ambiguities and human error.
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.
Despite decades of child nutrition initiatives, the rates of malnutrition throughout the developing world have remained high, and there is a need to explore new strategies to address this problem. Among the strategies to reduce malnutrition, there has been little exploration of the role of severe tooth decay—which is an infectious disease and the most prevalent chronic disease worldwide, currently affecting 50-95% of young children in developing countries. Over the past 2 decades, with rapid modernization and increased marketing and consumption of non-nutritious processed foods such as candy and soda, Vietnam and other developing countries face serious emerging risks to children’s oral health and nutrition. This Big Ideas project aims to solve two global health epidemics—severe early childhood tooth decay and malnutrition—using simple, low-cost interventions: fluoride dental varnish, toothbrushes, toothpaste, and oral health/nutrition education to improve the health and well-being of children in areas that currently lack access to these resources.
The Suitcase Clinic is a student-run organization that operates three drop-in centers for the homeless and low income community of the East Bay and Alameda County. This project will expand the Clinic’s services to include dental care. By addressing the dental care needs of underserved communities, A Healthy Smile will instill newfound confidence in clients. Dental Services to be provided include comprehensive and preventative care, cleanings and surgical extractions, dental x-rays, root platings, fillings, oral hygiene instruction and supplies, and 5 anterior root canals. The Dental Service is driven to provide more comprehensive services through the belief that adequate dental care is a right of all persons, regardless of their ability to pay.
(Note: This project originally won in the Big Ideas “Social Justice & Community Engagement” category.)
