Gerard Cangelosi of the University of Washington in the U.S. will develop reagents to visually validate oral swabs and stabilize them for storage and transport to diagnostic laboratories in low-resource settings without the need for a cold chain. Oral swabbing to extract saliva is a non-invasive and effective method for diagnosing tuberculosis, and is faster and safer than traditional sputum collection. However, it is more difficult to review the quality of a swab sample as they are hard to see, and processing currently requires refrigeration. To address these limitations, they will develop a low-cost, quality control test with chemical reagents for detecting human mitochondrial DNA using human oral swabs from U.S. volunteers spiked with an avirulent strain of Mycobacterium tuberculosis. This will be coupled to a visual fluorescent readout that can be used to distinguish adequate from inadequate samples. They will also test different buffers for their ability to stabilize the swab samples at different temperatures for up to six months.

Jan Willem Alffenaar of the University Medical Center Groningen in the Netherlands will develop two simple tests that measure the concentration of anti-tuberculosis drugs in treated patients in low-resource settings in order to optimize dosage and limit the emergence of deadly multi-drug resistant Mycobacterium tuberculosis (MDR-TB). The increased incidence of MDR-TB is due in part to low levels of anti-tuberculosis drugs, thus dosage optimization during treatment is important. However, doing this in low-resource settings is currently challenging. They will develop a method for use in Tanzania to measure the concentration of the anti-TB drug fluoroquinolone in saliva using a battery-operated UV spectrophotometer. They will also modify a high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) platform for detecting drug concentrations in dried blood spots, which are collected on filter paper and do not require refrigeration to remain stable. The on-site saliva test will allow detection of patients with too low levels of drug at risk for treatment failure, who can then have their dose optimized following the more detailed dried blood spot analysis at a centralized laboratory.

Amadou Alpha Sall of Institut Pasteur de Dakar in Senegal will add quantum dots to liquid patient samples for better tracking of results and to store diverse types of information relevant for diagnostics and research that can be retrieved in real-time. They will tag samples using stable semiconductor quantum dots to generate unique signatures that can be read by a mobile-based, lens-free, fluorescence microscope. They will develop algorithms to enhance the efficiency of encoding and decoding the data from the quantum dot signatures, and design a cloud-connected database using commercial infrastructures for sample data storage and retrieval. They will perform a field trial with a local laboratory network and real clinical samples to evaluate sample collection, tracking capability, and ease of use.

Gershim Asiki of the African Population and Health Research Centre in Kenya will develop a mobile phone application and centralized electronic database to link birth records with immunizations to increase the coverage of BCG and polio vaccines in newborns in Kenya. Births and immunizations are initially recorded on paper and then transferred to separate electronic databases, meaning that many infants fail to receive the standard vaccinations on time. They have developed an integrated database that collects both birth and immunization data directly from nurses and health workers via mobile phones. They will evaluate the feasibility of their approach by registering around 450 newborns from an urban slum, and train community health workers to register pregnancies, due dates and delivery dates using the mobile phone application. They will monitor the newborns up to two months after birth, and test the effect of their approach on the timeliness of vaccinations.

Folusho Balogun of the University of Ibadan in Nigeria will train older women who are traditionally involved in childcare in Nigeria to ensure infants in their communities are fully immunized. Many young children in Nigeria, particularly those in urban slums, are not fully immunized, or are immunized too late, leading to an unacceptably high under-five mortality rate. This is due in part to the mothers not understanding how critical immunizations are. In many African nations, the care of young children is also overseen by older women in the community such as grandmothers or neighbors. They hypothesize that training these older women to be formally involved in promoting immunizations will help to ensure all children complete the full package on time. They will select five urban slum communities in southwest Nigeria and use focus group discussions to explore the views of the older women on current immunization programs. They will use this to design a manual to train a group of older women who will be associated with pregnant women in the community, and evaluate the effect on immunization of the infants up to nine months.

Joanna Busza of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine in the United Kingdom will help vulnerable young mothers who sell sex in Zimbabwe by involving them in designing self-help groups incorporating virtual meetings via social media to build support networks and teach them life skills such as money management and parenting. Adolescent sex workers who become mothers are at high risk of developing mental health problems such as anxiety and depression, and often have little support caring for their children. They will involve adolescent women in the design stage by holding interviews and group discussions to gather opinion on social media and group meetings, as well as identify the types of skills they most need and how best to teach them. They will train peer educators to lead six-month virtual support groups and recruit young, pregnant sex workers to pilot test the approach in two urban sites in Zimbabwe.

Anne Marie Chomat of McGill University in Canada will design an intervention to overcome the mental health problems faced by young mothers in Guatemala by engaging them, along with their partners and fathers, elders, and adolescents in their communities, in order to address the complex factors affecting maternal health. Women in Maya indigenous areas of Guatemala, which has recently faced a civil war, experience particularly high rates of poverty, gender inequality, adolescent births, and mental health disorders. This in turn harms their children, with over 50% suffering from severe developmental delays. They recognize that community members are best placed to find solutions to their own problems and can better promote community-level change. So, they will engage community members from multiple generations and positions, including traditional healers and spiritual leaders, to co-develop an intervention. Their project will take place in four communities in two rural regions of Guatemala, and the community groups will work together to define the problems and contribute to designing and implementing the intervention.

Rebecca Dempster of HIAS in the U.S. will develop an online game- and mentorship-based intervention to improve the mental health of refugee adolescent mothers in Kenya that integrates into their daily lives and helps them develop new skills. Digital games can help treat mental health disorders such as depression particularly in young people because they have a natural appeal and are easy to access from home. They will recruit ten young mothers, a psychologist, and software programmers to design a mental health game so that it can be used to identify those with mental health disorders and connect them with counselors, and provides interactive challenges to help treat and protect against those disorders as well as build relevant life skills. They will then train these young mothers to act as mentors to support the online game, and pilot test their approach on a sample of 15 refugee adolescent mothers over three months to evaluate feasibility, acceptability, and effect on maternal depression.

Syed Usman Hamdani from the Human Development Research Foundation in Pakistan will develop a program that teaches life skills such as self-awareness, communication, and parenting skills, to adolescent newlyweds in poor areas of Pakistan to help them cope with the challenges of marriage, pregnancy, and bringing up children. Pakistan has one of the highest adolescent birth rates in the world, with 10% of girls giving birth before the age of 18. Many of these girls go to live with their new in-laws, but they lack the skills needed to handle these major events, leaving them more susceptible to mental health issues such as depression. The Thinking Healthy Program is an existing WHO intervention involving community health workers providing coping strategies using cognitive behavioral techniques to depressed young mothers in rural Pakistan. They will develop and incorporate selected life skills into this program, in consultation with young women and other community members, and evaluate its feasibility and impact on mental health in a randomized controlled trial with 60 married women under 19 years old.

Allya Paramita Koesoema of the eHealth and Telemedicine Society in Indonesia will develop a pro-vaccination campaign to counteract the widespread negative views of vaccinations in Indonesia by engaging religious leaders and health workers in local communities to directly address misconceptions. Anti-vaccination narratives, many based on religious misconceptions, have spread through the country, largely via social media, leading to a decrease in child vaccination coverage. Health workers often do not have the knowledge to explain away these misconceptions to mothers when they refuse to have their children vaccinated. To address this, they will engage stakeholders to identify the anti-vaccination messages and build a database of effective reasoning to directly challenge those messages that can be accessed by health workers and other respected, senior community members. They will perform a randomized controlled trial in different districts in Indonesia, and supplement the pro-vaccination messengers with vaccination reminders and schedules sent directly to mothers via mobile phone. They will test the usability of their approach and its effect on the willingness of the mothers to vaccinate.

Jeroen Lammertyn, Jaroslav Belotserkovsky, and Michael Kraft of KU Leuven in Belgium will develop a low-cost device to simplify blood collection and processing for monitoring of HIV viral load in low-resource settings. Most diagnostic assays work on blood, which must be manually collected from the patient, and then processed and stored before analysis. This requires trained health workers and infrastructure, is time-consuming, and can be unsafe. They will develop a simple, integrated device to collect and process blood. This will allow blood collection to be less invasive and safer than conventional methods, and integrating collection and processing in a single device would cut the time needed to produce diagnostic-ready samples. Because of the simplicity of the device, only minimal training is required to operate it. They will optimize their device for the removal and preparation of sufficient volumes of blood for subsequent analysis, and test it in model systems.

Aleksandra Perczynska from People in Need in Nepal will develop two approaches, namely mobile phone voice messaging (mobile health [mHealth]) and workshops, to improve the mental health of young mothers in Nepal. In 2016, over 15% of Nepali girls aged 15-19 years had children. These adolescents are particularly vulnerable to mental health disorders such as depression, and often have limited support from the community and their new in-laws. They will recruit young mothers and mental health workers to help design the two approaches. mHealth will deliver mental and infant health information using interactive media such as audio dramas via simple mobile phones, which many of these women own, as well as tests to determine whether they understood the information, completion of which will be rewarded with phone credits. The workshops will cover health issues, safety issues such as those related to violence, and life skills such as confidence building, and be held by female community health volunteers who will be further trained in psychology and leading interactive workshops for young women. The workshops will also reach out to the in-laws of the young mothers to educate them on the benefits of mental health. They will implement their approach in an earthquake-affected area and evaluate its impact on the mental health and empowerment of the young mothers.

Agnes Ronan, from Pediatric Adolescent Treatment Africa, in South Africa will develop a training and supervision tool for young health workers that combines screening and support in an accessible format to reduce depression in HIV-positive, adolescent mothers. There are an estimated two million adolescent mothers living with HIV in Africa, and stigma prevents many of them accessing health care. Young HIV-positive peer supporters work in local clinics and use informal chats, text messages, and home visits to support HIV-positive adolescents. However, they lack the skills to support the mental health of HIV-positive adolescent mothers. They will adapt existing cognitive behavioral therapy methods based on the WHO's Thinking Healthy program, and co-develop their approach with adolescent mothers, peer supporters, and developers. They will train 70 peer supporters from six southern African countries and each will recruit three HIV-positive adolescent mothers to test the approach.

Dyuti Sen and Tushar Garg from Innovators in Health in India will test whether a communal game of snakes and ladders in maternity health clinics and in homes of pregnant couples can demonstrate the value of childhood immunization to improve coverage in rural communities in Bihar, India. Gameplay may be a valuable way of informing parents about the importance of immunizing their children because it is fun and interactive. Snakes and ladders, which is a popular game in India, can also visually illustrate the positive (ladder) and negative (snake) effects of immunization, such as the economic cost of having a sick child. The board is built up interactively by the parents as they make choices about vaccinating their children from the start (newborn) to the finish (fully protected child). They will train community health workers to facilitate communal games of snakes and ladders, trial their approach in around 15 municipal wards over 12 months, and determine its impact on immunization coverage and local knowledge.

Estelle Sidze of African Population and Health Research Centre in Kenya will work with adolescent mothers in Nairobi slums to develop a toolkit of information, skills, and coping mechanisms, to protect their mental health during pregnancy and early motherhood. Many girls in Nairobi slums become pregnant, but have limited knowledge about how to care for a baby, and are often excluded from their homes. They will interview adolescent mothers to find out what harms their mental health during pregnancy, what effect this has on their behavior, and how they try to cope. They will also work with them, and with health workers and community members, to build the toolkit to protect them from these stressors. This toolkit will include providing information, and teaching problem-solving and confidence-building skills. They will test their approach on a sample of 150 adolescent girls who are pregnant or are new mothers using trained adolescent mentors with two delivery methods: organized two-hour meetings with up to ten participants in selected safe spaces; and five-person online discussion groups via the WhatsApp messenger application.

Ashenafi Tazebew of the University of Gondar in Ethiopia will develop a training and supervision program whereby medical and nursing staff working at local health science colleges in Ethiopia are trained to teach and mentor local health care workers to improve their skills, and the quality and safety of immunizations, thereby increasing uptake. They will develop supervisory and mentorship guidelines and tools, and train college workers how to coach primary health care providers and review their performances. They will conduct a randomized field trial over six months to evaluate the quality of the mentorship and its impact on the knowledge and skills of the health workers.

Owens Wiwa of the Clinton Health Access Initiative in Nigeria will develop an efficient and reliable system for tracking diagnostic samples and delivering results to improve the efficiency of HIV diagnosis and treatment of newborns in Nigeria. Over 3.5 million people in Nigeria are estimated to be living with HIV, and every year up to 40,000 newborns become infected. Many HIV-exposed infants are not properly diagnosed or monitored, leading to delays in treatment and worsening of the disease. With input from health workers and scientists amongst others, they will adapt an existing unstructured supplementary service data (USSD) platform linked to laboratory information management system (LIMS) software so that the health facilities and diagnostic laboratories can track individual samples and monitor results via mobile phone. They will select health facilities and train staff to pilot test the platform over 12 months.

Sanjay Jain of Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in the U.S. and colleagues in the U.S. and India will develop a cloud-based platform to record the location, caregiver relationships, and immunization records of infants in developing countries, and provide personalized reminders and incentives via mobile phone to improve the coverage of childhood immunizations. Low immunization coverage has been linked to inaccurate or incomplete records, and the difficulties of encouraging follow-up immunizations and identifying those who miss them. Their platform will store data in a cloud to ensure universal access to records, and use fingerprint identification of the caregiver for accuracy. It will also document each child's care network and location, and use this to send multiple text message reminders, and manage group and combined vaccinations to improve efficiency. They will test their approach in a low-resource rural community by training health workers equipped with mobile tablets, and recruiting around 800 mothers with infants or pregnant women provided with mobile phones.

Jacob McKnight and Mike Wilson of the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom will develop a simple application that contains information about the quality, location, and the nature and cost of services provided by the different pathology laboratories in Kenya so that doctors and patients can choose the one that best suits their needs. They will conduct surveys to collect key information on the pathology laboratories in the Nairobi area, and consult with doctors and medical associations to find out how they use those laboratory services and what needs to be improved. They will build the application using these data and in collaboration with users. Ultimately, the system should also help to improve the overall quality of services.

Daniel Pepper of Vayu in the U.S. will assess the value of using unmanned aerial vehicles integrated with existing healthcare supply chains to transport healthcare products and diagnostic samples in Senegal. Healthcare supply chains are critical for saving lives but are restricted by poor road infrastructure in developing countries. Unmanned aerial vehicles can overcome these restrictions and ensure rapid transport in temperature-controlled conditions. They will engage stakeholders from the Pharmacie National d'Approvisionnement (PNA) to National laboratories, the Expanded Program of Immunization, the National Blood Bank and the Ministry of Health to explore the feasibility of using unmanned aerial vehicles for delivering vaccines, essential medicines, contraceptive products and blood, and also to pick up tuberculosis samples for diagnosis. They will perform a test over a three- to four-month period to evaluate the impact of their approach on delivery and costs, and gather feedback from users.

Shahnoza Eshonkhojaeva of Sinostream AB in Sweden will use machine-learning algorithms to predict the amount of medicines and supplies needed at individual health clinics in low-resource settings, and to inform medical stores for delivery. Their approach involves obtaining daily consumption patterns that are recorded on smart paper stock cards at rural health clinics, which requires no training, internet access, or electricity. These cards will then be scanned at district health service centers, the data digitized, and algorithms used to calculate consumption patterns and waste, and automatically predict future demand. They will build a prototype system and field test it in Uganda to evaluate how well it avoids under- or overstocking products, and the cost-saving and time-saving benefits of having an automated stock management system.

Roice Fulton of the Denominator Group in Switzerland will test the value of blockchain, which is a decentralized secure database, for stakeholders such as distributors and health workers to record and monitor the movement of a vaccine along a supply chain, to ensure the availability of sufficient levels of working vaccines. Following the route of a vaccine from the producer to the patient would ensure its safety and allow for better monitoring of stock and supply chain performance, which would improve vaccine availability and help identify ways to increase efficiency and lower costs. Blockchain is an efficient and secure way to share information. They will test their approach in Tanzania, which has a fairly robust supply chain, by tailoring blockchain to integrate with existing platforms, and evaluate its ability to reliably monitor vaccines.

Jessica Vernon of Maisha Meds in the U.S. will develop a smartphone-based point-of-sale system and online ordering platform to better supply medications to the private healthcare markets across sub-Saharan Africa. Local private pharmacies supply important health care products to a large number of people, particularly those without employer-funded health care. However, they are often understocked, or stocked with poor quality or expensive medicines, and require cash payments. Because many pharmacy owners have smartphones, they are developing a point-of-sale system for Android devices that records information associated with each sale such as price, brand, and patient phone number. This will enable the shop owners to better manage their inventory and predict future demand, thereby improving their performance. They will also leverage partnerships with trusted suppliers and develop an e-Marketplace so that pharmacists can order stocks electronically based on these predictions. They will test their platform over nine months in selected pharmacies in Kenya.

Yuehwern Yih of Purdue University in the U.S. will develop a cloud-based digital tracking tool to record data from local health centers in Uganda on the health status of pregnant women and the turnover of their stock, as well as diagnostic laboratory data, to optimize ordering and improve the availability of medical supplies. They will develop applications mimicking the current time-consuming paper-based registry formats to digitally record the relevant data, and adapt a material requirement planning system, which is used in manufacturing to track parts and maintain stocks. They will test their approach in two Ugandan hospitals to evaluate its effect on the efficiency of ordering and maintaining supplies, and on patient health.

Lee Schroeder of the University of Michigan in the U.S. will develop a smartphone application that can be used by health centers in Ghana to request independent drivers to transport patient samples quickly and at low cost to laboratories for diagnostic testing. Current courier services in resource-poor settings, when available, can be unreliable or expensive. A 'sharing economy' approach to delivery, by hiring independent drivers online, could improve services and reduce costs. They will develop a simple application for different devices, and recruit and train health workers and drivers to use the application, and package and transport the samples. They will then pilot test their approach for timely delivery of excess samples to two district level hospitals.

T.J. Corcoran of Hemalytics LLC in the U.S. will create a platform incorporating a web portal and smartphone application to track patients and their samples during diagnostic testing in low-resource settings to ensure they receive the results, and in a timely manner. They will develop a suite of mobile health tools for storing encrypted patient and sample data, capturing test results in the laboratory, and notifying patients and health workers of the results. They will test their platform using patients, laboratories, and administrators located in different cities in the U.S. This approach will help interconnect patients, health workers, and diagnostic laboratories, and thereby improve disease management.

Ruth Betchel of VillageReach in the U.S. will create a hub to coordinate and track the transport of clinical samples from health facilities to laboratories for diagnosis in Mozambique so that diseases such as HIV and tuberculosis can be identified and treated earlier. Timely diagnosis of disease is also critical for preventing spread. In Mozambique, the existing transport system for patient samples relies on outside providers and is largely uncoordinated, unreliable, and inefficient. They will create a transport coordinating center equipped with an information system to enable dispatchers to match the planned transport routes of a network of existing drivers with samples waiting to be transported. They will also build a sample tracking tool that works via a smartphone application for health workers to request transport and to monitor samples during transport. This will help identify ways to increase the efficiency and speed of delivery.

Natasha Gous of SystemOne in the U.S. will develop a mobile application and digital platform to support people testing themselves for HIV by sending them reminders, offering guidance, and reporting the results. Simple and rapid diagnostic tests and self-testing are now being used across low-resource settings to improve the diagnosis of HIV infections. However, results need to be interpreted manually, which can be difficult for uneducated users, and linked with health facilities so the appropriate care can be given. To address these issues, they will develop a downloadable application so that users can enter their personal data, such as age, sex, and location, and receive instructions on how to perform the test. They will also develop a secure, online database that collects the test results, provides custom reporting, and integrates with the existing laboratory information systems so that health coordinators can monitor testing uptake and disease incidence, and HIV positive users can be informed of where to receive care. They will pilot test their approach for usability and accuracy of reporting with 300 individuals in a clinic in South Africa.

Sara Grobbelaar of Stellenbosch University in South Africa will develop a platform that can analyze existing real-time data on the stocks of health products at clinics across South Africa and present it to all players in the supply chain to ensure products are available when needed. In partnership with a Northern academic institution they will collect and sort relevant data, analyze trends, and develop decision-making tools. The platform will allow analysis, modeling, and forecasting in the health product supply chain so that unexpected changes such as supply disruptions or epidemics can be accommodated.

Fassika Fikre Hailemeskel of Maisha Technologies PLC in Ethiopia will build and field-test their drone for the rapid delivery of blood from blood banks to health facilities across Ethiopia. Almost 50% of maternal deaths in Ethiopia are caused by hemorrhage. Although there are 24 regional blood banks, difficult terrain and limited infrastructure on the ground mean that delivery to certain areas is almost impossible. A drone would bypass these obstacles. Their drone has been locally designed and will be locally built to keep cost to a minimum, and they will first test it for flight-performance and air-worthiness. They will then design a second, updated drone and test its ability to deliver routine and emergency blood from a single blood bank over two months. This will inform the design of a final version, which will be built and analyzed for drone and delivery performance, and impact particularly on maternal health.

Daniel Carucci of The Immunity Charm Foundation in the U.S. will produce a low-cost bracelet as a visual cue to encourage parents in south Asia to get their children fully vaccinated at the appropriate times. There is a widely held belief in south Asia that black beads on a bracelet protect children from evil spirits. Using that symbol of protection they have designed an 'Immunity Charm' bracelet for infants, which has the traditional black beads as well as a series of colored beads, each representing a vaccine that protects against one disease. The colored bead is added when the associated vaccination has been received. They will evaluate their approach for promoting vaccinations in five health centers in India by launching an awareness campaign with posters and flyers, training health workers, and supplying the bracelets.

Inuwa Barau Ya'u of the National Primary Health Care Development Agency (NPHCDA) in Nigeria will use bracelets of different colors to symbolize the order of the five routine childhood vaccinations to remind families with limited education when to get their children immunized. Bracelets are low cost and easy to see on an infant, and are a common adornment in many cultures, including the Fulani tribe found in remote areas in Northern Nigeria. Vaccination coverage is low across Nigeria, with vaccine-preventable diseases still accounting for over 20% of infant mortality. They will combine the bracelets with a peer education program whereby mothers are encouraged to spread information on the vaccines received by their children to their peers. Their approach will be tested in a pilot study with 300 mother/infant pairs in an urban and rural location to see if it improves on-time vaccination coverage.

Sidney Sampson of Sydsam Integrated Services Limited in Nigeria will produce a low-cost wristband that can be worn by infants from birth until nine months that uses a flashing light to remind mothers when one of the five standard childhood vaccinations is due. Timely childhood vaccinations are critical for preventing deadly diseases, but many low-resource settings such as northwestern Nigeria have low immunization coverage rates and high dropout rates. They will design a waterproof silicon wristband in different colors and test it for user friendliness and safety. The prototype will then be pilot tested over 10 months in 132 urban and rural health facilities across Nigeria for improving timely immunization coverage.

Emmanuel Ihedioha of Lifespan Healthcare Resource Ltd in Nigeria will develop a web-based platform that acts as a lifetime register to track the immunizations of all Nigerian children from birth, issues timely reminders to parents and community members via SMS, and informs medical facilities which vaccines are needed. Currently, immunization cards issued to mothers are used to record and plan immunizations, but they can be lost or contain errors. An added problem is that the required vaccine is not always available at every clinic because it is difficult to know how much will be needed and where. The platform will be functional offline and can be periodically synchronized with the web-hosted platform when internet connection is available to keep the register up to date. They will pilot test their platform through Nigeria's national program on immunization in six states to evaluate its effect on timely vaccine uptake, and get feedback from users.

James Njeru of the Field Epidemiology Society of Kenya in Kenya will develop a simple electronic system using basic phone technology that registers the birth and immunizations of all children in Kenya, and can send vaccination reminders. At present, childhood vaccinations are often missed or given late in Kenya, which causes substantial health problems. Electronically recording all births would enable vaccinations to be better tracked and reminders to be sent on time to parents, but has been problematic because internet and computer access is often limited. They will build the system using Unstructured Supplementary Service Data (USSD) that requires only a regular mobile phone, which are more widely available than internet access and computers. Both home and hospital births and all vaccinations can then be easily recorded by mobile phone, and timely vaccination reminders sent to local health administrators. They will test the system in a district with around 3,000 annual births.

Conor Walsh of Harvard University and Elisabeth Salisbury of the University of Massachusetts Medical School in the U.S. will develop a low-cost, wearable, monitoring device to improve kangaroo mother care for newborns in remote settings. Kangaroo mother care is an established childcare method that is particularly valuable for preterm infants. It uses clothing to attach the baby to the caregiver, thereby ensuring continuous skin-to-skin contact to provide warmth. However, too much or too little heat can also be dangerous, but there is currently no way to monitor that. They will develop and test washable, temperature- and stretch-sensitive materials that can attach to existing kangaroo mother care garments to monitor the temperature and breathing rate of the infant. The device will also be able to alert the parent using color or other simple cues when they need to warm or cool the infant or provide stimulation.

Arun Agarwal of Janitri Innovations Private Ltd in India will test a low-cost, wearable device that monitors fetal heart rate and uterine contractions during labor and automatically alerts health workers when the fetus is deprived of oxygen, which is a major cause of neonatal death in India. Existing methods are expensive and require skilled medical professionals to operate them and analyze the results. This means they are not used during the majority of births in India. The device uses multiple surface electrodes for monitoring and they will evaluate different noise removal filters and signal amplifiers, and build algorithms to analyze the data and detect fetal hypoxia. The value of their device will be compared with existing methods using 100 pregnant women during labor.

Friso Postma of the Early Signal Foundation in the U.S. will develop algorithms to translate biological data from wearable sensors on pregnant women such as temperature and heart rate to identify patterns that predict the onset of labor, to help get women in remote settings to health clinics in time for birth. They will select an existing wearable sensor to semi-continuously collect information on multiple factors such as gait, sleep architecture, and blood pressure of 60 Belgian women in the third trimester in their home. They will build infrastructure for data storage and a clinical support network, and analyze the data to identify features that can accurately predict labor.

Debra E. Weese-Mayer, Roozbeh Ghaffari, John A. Rogers, Matt Glucksberg, Aaron Hamvas, Mark Fisher, Bill Grobman and Casey Rand of the Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children's Hospital of Chicago and the Center for Bio-Integrated Electronics at the Simpson & Querrey Institute, Northwestern University in the U.S. will develop a skin-like sensor for newborns that improves the value of kangaroo mother care (KMC), which is a method used to maintain skin contact with the mother to keep the baby warm. Kangaroo mother care is particularly useful for premature babies in low-resource settings, but it is difficult to monitor how often it is used once the mothers have gone home. They have developed a wearable, ultrathin sensor adapted to delicate newborn skin by fusing soft, stretchable bioelectronics that can measure multiple physiological parameters such as breathing rate and temperature non-invasively through the skin. The device also emits audio and visual alerts when potentially dangerous values are detected, and can store and transmit data wirelessly for clinical monitoring and analysis. They will adapt the sensor to also detect motion and develop it for use during kangaroo mother care. The device will be tested for usability on a panel of mothers and nurses in a clinic in South Africa, and for accuracy in a U.S. based medical center.

Ratul Narain of BEMPU Technologies in India will create a sleeve that can be simply attached to slings used for kangaroo mother care, which is a continuous skin-to-skin contact method of care for newborns suited to low-resource settings, to measure and encourage use. Kangaroo mother care is particularly beneficial for preterm and low-weight babies as it maintains their body temperature and thereby avoids hypothermia and promotes weight gain. However, in India, uptake in the home is low, which appears to be due in part to the lack of real-time feedback for mothers showing how it is helping their baby. They will make the attachable sleeve, known as Kangagrow, containing mechanical force gauges and an audio-visual interface displaying a colored flower that gradually blooms during the continual use of kangaroo mother care to demonstrate to the mother and family that their efforts are providing what is essentially 'nourishment' to the baby. It will also contain a safe power source that doesn't require charging over the 30-day neonatal period. They will verify its accuracy in a hospital setting, and perform a multicenter trial of 100 mothers to see whether it promotes newborn weight gain and growth.

Soumyadipta Acharya of Johns Hopkins University in the U.S. will develop a technology they call NeMo (neonatal monitoring), for families in low-resource settings to monitor their newborns at home to help them identify potentially severe illnesses. Infant mortality rates are highest during the first week of life, and in developing countries are largely caused by treatable diseases such as pneumonia or sepsis. To help families detect these conditions they are developing a device that comprises a low-cost, paper sensor that can be placed on the infant's abdomen to measure respiratory rate and temperature, and a smartphone application that uses audio and visual cues to enable a family member to clinically assess the infant. The measurements and assessments together are then used to alert the family to dangerous conditions and connect them with a health worker. They will develop training methods and perform a pilot test of their device in Uganda to analyze usability.

Jonas Oddur Jonasson of MIT Sloan School of Management in the U.S. and collaborators will develop a more cost-effective method for transporting clinical samples between health centers and diagnostic laboratories in low-resource settings. In most countries in Southern Africa, sample transport is uncoordinated and leads to regular unnecessary trips, resulting in higher costs and long delays in disease diagnosis. They will develop an algorithm that uses the numbers and locations of samples needing to be transported each day to design optimal courier routes, and test its effect on cost and turnaround times using historical data in Malawi. They will also evaluate hardware devices for health workers to communicate collection requests to sample transport operators. They will run a pilot test of their system in Malawi to evaluate usability and the value of optimizing transport routes.

Robert Steinglass of JSI Research & Training Institute, Inc in the U.S. will teach community members to use traditional methods such as a drum to signal the arrival of a vaccination team to villages in India to improve vaccination coverage. Children in remote villages are vaccinated by outreach services. Although visits are scheduled on specific days, they often change, and there is no simple way to inform all the relevant families. Sound can travel long distances and is used to call communities together in many cultures. They will pilot test their approach over 12 months in a remote and hilly district in India, and train health workers and a community member to use a culturally-acceptable sound to alert the villagers to the arrival of the vaccinations. They will evaluate its effect on timely vaccination coverage.

Ayumi Arai of the University of Tokyo in Japan will use anonymized mobile phone data to produce a dynamic census that reveals the movements of all individuals in a population over time broken down into age and gender to help reduce regional malaria transmission. Human mobility and distribution play key roles in malaria transmission but it is difficult to monitor the movements of everybody in a population. They will gather call detail records and use them to develop an algorithm that considers non-phone users such as children and the elderly, and can predict gender and age group, which are linked to malaria vulnerability. To generate the dynamic census they will build a system incorporating application programming interfaces to support different input and output data formats to promote use by third parties and in other countries. They will apply the system to create a dynamic census of Mozambique, and validate it using data from transport networks and small-scale surveys.

Isabel Cruz of the University of Illinois at Chicago in the U.S. will build an ontology-based data integration framework that can predict where malaria incidence is likely to increase or decrease in Zimbabwe, to better target elimination efforts. Eliminating malaria requires being able to monitor the changing patterns of infection risk across an entire region, which is affected by multiple factors including the location of health centers, temperature, rainfall, type of landscape, and population distribution. Integrating these data is difficult because they come from different sources and are measured at different scales (resolution). Also, monitoring how a disease changes over space and time has been particularly challenging. They will develop methods using string matching to first translate the data into a common spatial data format, and then ontology matching to integrate the data. They will also introduce a novel resolution method that addresses uncertainty in spatial and temporal resolutions. These will be used for mapping a pilot region, and tools will be built to identify and visualize patterns of malaria progression in time and space.

Matt Berg of Ona Systems Inc. in the U.S. will develop a map widget that enables data collected by different platforms on different aspects of malaria, such as disease incidence and intervention efforts, to be accurately mapped and therefore more effectively integrated to help eliminate malaria. It is currently difficult to map specific events particularly in rural areas of developing countries, which lack formal addresses. Different groups use different naming schemes when recording disease-relevant data, making them difficult to cross-reference. They will develop the map widget so that users collecting or requesting data can pinpoint their location on a display of the layout of buildings and open spaces in their area using a mobile device. They will also adapt popular data collection platforms to be compatible with their system. Each location has an ID so a user can look up all disease-relevant events across different databases. In this way, the best intervention method to reduce malaria can be identified at each location. They will work with a national malaria elimination program to test their approach.

Jonathan Jackson of Dimagi in the U.S., together with James Faghmous from the Arnhold Institute for Global Health, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, will develop an open platform that combines real-time data on health, climate, and the environment at high resolution, and near real-time satellite data to inform on population density, in order to detect areas containing limited information (cold-spots) on malaria so that control programs can better allocate resources. Current efforts suffer from the absence of up-to-date information and the difficulty of predicting when and where interventions are needed. Platform development will be conducted in collaboration with academia and the private sector, and will be designed to use existing data recorded on mobile devices, which contain GPS data. The platform will be designed to use existing data recorded on mobile devices, which contain GPS data. These data will be supplemented by designing a machine-learning approach to extract population density from global satellite data. They will test the accuracy and usability of their software in Senegal.

Pradip Maiti of Immunimed Inc. in Canada will provide passive immunotherapy using chicken-egg-derived polyclonal antibodies against key proteins of the intestinal parasite Cryptosporidium. This orally-administered immunotherapy will prevent the chronic diarrhea and potentially lethal infection caused by this parasite. Treating patients directly with antibodies against a pathogen is quicker than using traditional vaccination methods that induce individuals to make their own antibodies, which takes days to weeks and can also be difficult in malnourished children. This immunotherapy is an alternative to antibiotics, which are becoming less effective. The immunotherapy will be in the form of an egg powder that can be ingested, which is also easier and safer than using injections. The resulting antibodies will be tested for specificity in vitro, and for their ability to treat the disease using a mouse model of Cryptosporidiosis.

Francisco Diaz of Pennsylvania State University in the U.S. will develop a high-throughput screening method to identify compounds that can block two biological events essential for female fertility without affecting ovulation or hormone production in order to identify new contraceptives with fewer side effects. These two events, which occur at the same time, are cumulus expansion, whereby cumulus cells release from the oocyte to enable it to enter the oviduct, and oocyte maturation, whereby the oocyte divides to produce the egg and a smaller polar body. They will extract cumulus oocyte complexes from primed female mice and apply them to a microwell array prototype that will contain 1,024 wells coated with different test compounds and connected in groups by microfluidic channels. Oocytes in the wells will be stimulated to undergo first cumulus expansion, and, after removal of cumulus cells, oocyte maturation. The ability of each compound to inhibit each step will be assessed by automated inverted microscopy. They will first optimize their platform using known inhibitors and then test it using a library of 1,200 FDA approved molecules.