Eamonn Keogh from University of California, Riverside in the U.S. will design and test a human computational game for individuals in developing countries to encourage positive behavior such as taking medication or attending school. The game is played on mobile phones, and begins with an automatic prompt to perform a specific healthy behavior, which then requires the individual to respond by sending photographic evidence of the behavior to a randomly selected individual for evaluation, with rewards offered for compliance. They will develop the game, write the necessary open source software, and conduct a case study in the developed world to evaluate and refine the approach.

Prasenjit Mondal of the International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research in Bangladesh will test whether supplying deworming medication to women of reproductive age reduces the incidence of helminth infections and associated anemia. Current mass drug administration efforts to eradicate parasitic infections are fairly successful but focus predominantly on school children. The incidence of infection in women of fertility age remains high, which affects both maternal and child health. To reach this vulnerable population, they will exploit the infrastructure of a current government program, which provides folic acid tablets to pregnant women via Community Clinics, by also providing deworming medication and associated counseling. They will evaluate their approach by measuring its effect on helminth infection levels.

Ratul Narain of BEMPU Technologies Private Ltd. in India will develop and test a temperature monitoring baby bracelet to reduce the incidence of hypothermia in newborns. Newborns are unable to regulate their body temperature, and low temperatures can lead to life-debilitating illnesses. Skin-to-skin warming (kangaroo care) can maintain a healthy body temperature, but is not commonly practiced in resource-poor regions in India, where newborn hypothermia rates are high. To address this, they will further develop an inexpensive and simple bracelet to be worn by babies during the first two months of life that sounds an alarm when the baby's temperature gets too low to prompt the parent to respond. Sensitivity and specificity will be optimized, and the bracelet evaluated in field trials.

Susana Nery of the University of Queensland in Australia will test whether soil transmitted helminth infections in school children from developing countries can be better controlled by providing deworming and improved hygiene practices to an entire community as opposed to just the schools, which is the current WHO recommendation. They will conduct a pilot study in Timor-Leste by recruiting primary schools and providing the recommended anti-helminthic drug albendazole along with access to improved water and hygiene practices either within the schools or to the local community. The incidence of parasite infections in the school children and the comparative cost of each approach will be evaluated.

Hesham Al-Mekhlafi of the University of Malaya in Malaysia in collaboration with Azal University for Human Development in Yemen will recruit and train youths and young researchers from rural areas in Yemen to teach their communities about preventing and treating specific enteric diseases. Although effective drugs exist for treating intestinal parasitic diseases such as soil-transmitted helminthiasis, many remain endemic in Yemen, particularly in rural populations where knowledge and attitudes towards these diseases are poor. They will select four communities and meet with local leaders to garner support for their project and help raise awareness. The effect of their approach will be evaluated on the incidence and severity of infections.

Sandra McCoy from University of California, Berkeley in the U.S. will analyze whether behavioral priming methods such as associational cues and social influence can promote adherence to HIV treatment in Tanzania. HIV prevalence in Tanzania is high, at 5.1%, and poor adherence to antiretroviral therapy is a major problem due in part to long patient waiting times and stigmatizing attitudes. Behavioral priming involves using a stimulus to indirectly or subconsciously influence behavior. They will hold group discussions with HIV patients and healthcare workers to identify several behavioral priming strategies such as positive feedback cues on health cards, and conduct a pilot study to evaluate their effect on adherence.

Damien Fair of Oregon Health & Science University in the U.S. will determine whether combinations of prenatal and early postnatal stress markers can be used to predict the developmental trajectories of specific cognitive processes known as executive functions, which underlie goal-directed behavior and are important for many social and academic skills. They will use their maternal-infant macaque model to identify stress markers such as maternal nutrition, heart rate, and cortisol levels that correlate with the later development of specific behaviors in offspring, and with brain connectivity at different developmental stages as measured by magnetic resonance imaging. The identified brain imaging and stress markers will also be analyzed using their dataset derived from maternal-infant humans.

Patrick De Boever of VITO in Belgium will study the effects of stress on neurodevelopment in children by building a database of biological markers of the stress response detected in saliva. They will generate comprehensive genetic and epigenetic profiles, such as DNA methylation patterns, of salivary samples taken after laboratory-controlled or environmental stress events from over 1000 children of a range of ages and backgrounds. The aim is to capture developmental changes in stress reactivity over time and use the profiles to predict the course of neurological development.

Nana Coleman of World Vision in the U.S. will teach positive parenting skills such as hugging, reading, and playing to parents in Armenia to promote healthy childhood development. They will exploit their existing network of health care providers and parent support groups to teach better parenting behavior, and integrate it with another program they have been running to improve child and maternal health. They will test whether this holistic strategy is more effective at changing parental behavior and improving childhood nutrition and development than the individual approaches.

James Ransom of IFETP in the U.S. will promote detection and treatment of five neglected tropical diseases in South Sudan by exploiting and further developing an existing health infrastructure that has successfully reduced the incidence of guinea worm disease. They will target two regions with particularly high incidences of the targeted diseases, and train the local health surveillance officers on preventative methods and to provide comprehensive care and treatment. They will also work to educate the public and media about these diseases.

Sean Deoni of Brown University in the U.S. will evaluate whether mapping myelination in the infant brain can predict their subsequent levels of cognitive ability such as language and motor functioning, which emerge later in childhood. Myelin is a lipid that is deposited around neuronal axons during development. Twenty-four infants between four and six months old will be recruited to a controlled pilot study. At six and 12 months the children will be evaluated for brain myelin content, using magnetic resonance imaging and neurocognitive functions, to link specific myelination levels with cognitive ability. In the future, this approach could also be used to measure the impact of the environment, such as diet, on brain development.

Laura Jelliffe-Pawlowski of the University of California, San Francisco in the U.S. is developing an algorithm to measure gestational age from metabolic markers taken during routine newborn screening. Measuring accurate gestational age is important for assessing infant health such as brain development, but it is challenging in developing countries without specialized equipment and expertise. In Phase I, they developed a statistical model using data on 51 metabolic markers from around 730,000 newborns in the U.S. that predicted gestational age at birth within around an average of one week margin of error. In Phase II, they will further adapt and test their algorithm for use in Malawi and Uganda by using existing data from 500 pregnancies in Malawi and 1000 in Uganda, and also determine its value for identifying newborns at risk of neonatal death or complications.