Track: Information Technology for Society
Coupling Wind Generators with Flexible Loads
Bringing Reliable Power & Mobile Communication to West Africa
Application of Bayesian Networks to Infrastructure Risk Management
iCare
TxtWorker
The TxtWorker team works to increase low wage workers ability to access information about social services in their community, through a mobile support project. TxtWorker is a text based bulletin that sends accurate and targeted information about social services in the area directly to a mobile phone.
The Pika Pen
Handwriting can be especially difficult for Children with disabilities such as autism, hypotonic cerebral palsy (HCP), and sensory integration disorder (SID). Through interviews with four independent occupational therapists (OT’s), The Pika Pen team has identified three indicators of poor handwriting technique in children with disabilities: improper pen tip force, grip pressure, and pen inclination angle. Additional visual, auditory, and tactile feedback of the above indicators is effective for retraining different tasks. The goal of Pika Pen is to improve handwriting by these three indicators through the development of a low-cost, sensor-rich pen that allows children, especially those with disabilities, to improve their handwriting technique. The Pika Pen introduces children to an improved sensory- feedback system which is relayed to the child as real-time visual, audible, and tactile feedback.
Pathologicode
Diabetes mellitus affects over 285 million people worldwide, and the number of people living with it grows at an annual rate of 2.3%. Pathologicode introduces innovative application and computer vision technologies to detect microangiopathy associated with prediabetes in individuals. This non-invasive, in- vivo procedure will provide healthcare professionals with detailed information on overall systemic health in order to screen for early indications of developing diabetes. By providing tools to screen for early indications of the disease, Pathologicode’s Peek software will enable healthcare professionals to provide early intervention through disease management protocols, ultimately leading to an overall improvement of patient health.
Politify
Politify (www.politify.us) is the first web application to forecast the financial impacts of political scenarios. Users input their demographic information and then Politify projects the effect that a candidate or policy will have on that person’s well-being—in dollars, including changes to tax incidence and government services. In addition to personal impacts, the user can also view impacts by income quintile and by geopolitical level (e.g. zip code, state, and nation). The results are displayed in an interactive HTML5 visualization with animated graphs and policy breakdowns. All forecasts are based on a non-partisan reading of the legislation or candidate platform. For aggregate impacts, Politify uses a state-of-the-art economic simulator developed by the Urban Institute. After learning this information,
users are encouraged to engage in the political process. Each page includes the option to: (a) register to vote, (b) donate to advocacy groups, or (c) endorse or oppose a candidate via social media outlets.