We seek to address a critical fourth delay that sustains high rates of maternal and neonatal mortality in western Kenya: the delay in a community's accountability to its mothers and infants. We will develop an innovative information technology that fosters rapid communication and feedback between mothers, their communities, and their healthcare providers: The Mother-Baby Health Network. This information platform will accomplish three primary objectives: (1) Facilitate home and group-based care through Community Health Workers (CHWs) to improve collective advocacy; (2) Provide communities with the capabilities to activate an emergency alert system; and (3) Foster transparency in community and health system responsiveness to maternal and newborn health. CHWs will be equipped to use clinical decision-support on Android phones to correctly triage women and newborns for care. Integrated with SMS messaging, they will be capable of notifying healthcare providers, alerting nearby GPS-tracked Mother-Baby Taxis in an emergency transport system, and activating a personalized community of Mother-Baby Advocates to mobilize local resources.

Pierluigi Bonello of Ohio State University in the U.S. will develop a surveillance system for crops using unmanned aerial vehicles (drones) to position sensors to help diagnose plant diseases in low-income countries. Plant diseases are usually identified first by the farmers or human scouts and then confirmed by laboratory testing. This process is inefficient and requires resources often unavailable in low-income countries, calling for alternative approaches. It is known that when a plant becomes infected, it produces specific chemicals. In addition, functional chemical groups in biological samples are known to vibrate in predictable ways after absorbing light. They will test whether this information can be exploited for the rapid and widespread detection of two plant diseases, rice blast and maize dwarf mosaic, by vibrational spectroscopy that could be positioned inside crop canopies by drones. Rice and maize grown in greenhouses and fields in the U.S. will be infected, and they will develop statistical methods to evaluate whether handheld spectrometers can distinguish between infected and uninfected plants. This technology could ultimately allow crop managers to control the spread of a disease even before plants show visual symptoms.

Natalie Cookson and colleagues at Quantitative BioSciences in the U.S. are developing an algae-based waste treatment system targeted for third-world applications. Cyanobacteria will treat a community's waste and produce two forms of renewable energy: nutrient-rich fertilizer to enhance agriculture and biomethane to power the facility and neighboring community.

Paul Dyson of Swansea University in the United Kingdom will work to control the incidence of sleeping sickness in humans, which is caused by the Trypanosome parasite transmitted by tsetse flies, by genetically modifying a fly gut bacterium to deliver double-stranded (ds) RNAs to block two important parasite proteins. Trypanosomes mature in the flies, thereby gaining the capacity to infect mammals. He will engineer the bacteria and introduce them into tsetse flies, then test the capacity of the dsRNAs to inhibit their target proteins in trypanosomes. This approach could lead to long-term control of this disease as the bacteria are maternally transmitted to the offspring.