ictdchick

So last year, our co-winners in the Bears Breaking Boundaries IT for Society contest was a group of students working on attachments for cell phone cameras that could be used for microscopy diagnosis of diseases like malaria. Since then both of our projects have been taken up by the Blum Center for Developing Economies, and the Telemicroscopy for Disease Diagnosis project has been written up in the news by a number of media organizations, including a recent issue of the Economist.

It’s part of an interesting new direction for technology research - instead of just building faster, more high-resolution (and more expensive) devices, people are working on ways to build low cost devices that are more robust, can be mass produced, and can provide good enough information for primary triage.

On another note, these devices (as the economist article posits) could be well deployed with a good mobile-phone-based data collection system - collecting not just text and numbers, but images as well.

As part of the evaluation for the Uganda OBA project, Ben Bellows and his collaborators at Makarere University are conducting a household survey in the coverage area of the project and in a similar control area. As part of this survey they have to also do sexually transmitted infection (STI) testing, trying to determine the actual prevalence of STIs and not just an estimate based on who comes in for diagnosis and treatment. Can you imagine how much easier and verifiable these surveys would be if 1) the data collection could be done electronically, and 2) digital media for the testing could be integrated into the data collection records? Not that all diagnoses could be done with cell-phone microscopy, and you still need careful sample and slide preparation. But it’s still something to think about…

My friend Neema pointed out AfriGadget, a blog showcasing African ingenuity. The posts currently on the front page feature everything from biodiesel and renewable energy to simpsons toys to mobile phones made from recycled parts.

So with all the recent news on Kenya’s elections and subsequent (concurrent?) riots, it crosses my mind that there is a great need for transparent+verifiable, reliable, and low-cost voting systems in developing countries. I know that a lot of people at UC Berkeley and other universities are working on e-voting, both on the implementation/computer science side, and on the policy side. But of course much of this work is targeted towards federal United States voting requirements, which entail all sorts of things like audit trails, voter anonymity (both to protect individuals, and to prevent them from selling votes), as well as probably lots more esoteric accessibility requirements, not to mention our weird electoral system and lots of absentee ballots.
Imagine if Diebold or Pitney-Bowes came up with a low cost electronic voting system that could not be compromised (okay, given, that’s still a hard problem) and could be used by governments of developing countries to hold reliable elections. Read the rest of this entry »