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.

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.

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.

Beth Smith from the University of Southern California in the U.S. will determine whether monitoring the arm movements of infants can be used to as a non-invasive proxy for neural development to help identify defects and aid treatment. They will perform a longitudinal study of 45 children, including preterm infants, who will be assessed monthly from one to six months of age. Motion sensory equipment will measure the type and quality of their arm movements, which will be correlated with cortical brain activity measured via electroencephalography (EEG). These data will then be used to generate standard curves of brain function based on movement that may be able to identify children with impaired neural development.