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mHealth4Afrika is a collaborative research and innovation project, co-funded under Horizon 2020. It is focused on supporting Sustainable Development Goal 3 and Horizon 2020 Societal challenges by developing, researching and evaluating the potential impact of co-designing an open source, multilingual enabled mHealth platform to support quality community-based primary maternal healthcare delivery at...
In support of L'Institut Technique de la Cote Sud (ITCS), with funding through the IEEE Humanitarian Activities Committee, a team from the University of Colorado Boulder (CU Boulder) has led the design/install of a photovoltaic system to provide for daily educational electrical needs while simultaneously serving as a living laboratory for hands-on teaching at the vocational training institute for...
Four 5.8 GHz band transceivers at the University of Colorado at Boulder (UCB) were first operated as a wide area local area network (WLAN) in April of 2017. The purpose of this WLAN is to serve as a testbed for installations to be made in the developing world as a part of the IEEE Smart Village program. The configuration of the components is discussed in detail. The testbed is self-powered by solar...
Distributed manufacturing, where decentralized small, local sites are engaged in production, often supported by digital systems and networks, can be a powerful tool in humanitarian aid. Field Ready uses distributed manufacturing to produce essential non-food items locally where they are needed during humanitarian responses. Such supplies can be available to communities in need and to relief workers...
Pakistan recently released its first multi-dimensional poverty report in 2016, which underlined the fact that a country with almost 200 million in total population has a 39% rate for poverty, precisely estimating it to detail that around 78 million people are still living below the national poverty line. The poverty has distressed around 55% of the population residing in rural parts of the country...
Over 95% of the population in Uganda relies on solid fuels for their cooking and heating needs [1]. These are burned in a variety of cooking appliances, ranging from three stone fires to improved cookstoves (ICS). Appropriate Energy Saving Technologies (AEST Ltd.) is a social business that manufactures and distributes Makaa fuel briquettes and charcoal cookstoves in Soroti, Uganda. This work summarizes...
Developing nations like India face major challenges in their developmental efforts due to issues related to waste management and open defecation. While the urban community faces challenges related to plastic waste which has become almost all pervasive, the rural counterpart's open defecation continues to pose significant health threats. Lack of large-scale utilization of plastic from the urban population...
Child health screening is a fundamental component of public health, which includes neonatal screening, detection of infectious diseases and monitoring of nutritional status. Unfortunately, the tools to perform these tasks are often very crude, requiring manual input of data which is prone to error and falsification. Furthermore, the staff which performs these duties often lack clinical training or...
Social Media plays an increasingly important role in humanitarian and disaster response scenarios. However, typical social media applications rely on internet connectivity, and as a result are often not available during the acute phase of disasters. The MeshMS service of the Serval Mesh established the practicality of implementing a secure and private SMS-like textmessaging facility that can be used...
Self-organizing Mobile Ad-hoc Networks (MANETs) based on Delay Tolerant Networking (DTN), are powerful tools for maintaining or reestablishing telecommunications following disasters and other infrastructure disrupting events. However, such networks typically have very limited bandwidth compared with infrastructure-based networks, with the practical effect that they cannot satisfy every demand placed...
The Question Box is a ruggedized cellular phone-booth designed to allow low-income communities the ability to access expert advice on a variety of topics, free of charge. This simple concept enables such consultation irrespective of income or literacy level, and has proven its value in deployments in rural India and in Sierra Leone during the Ebola crisis. The system consists primarily of the Question...
Coastal communities constitute ∼40% of the total U.S. population, and roughly 50% of the national GDP is attributed to socio-economic activities in these regions. Port system operations and related industries constitute a majority of the industrial activities occurring in the region. This paper presents preliminary results from our work on the development of “FREIDA in Ports”: an interactive information...
During disasters people start using social media as a platform to share and disseminate real-time disaster information to wider audiences. In order to understand the type of information that is being shared during disasters and how communities are using the technologies to respond to the disasters, we analyze two-different case studies on natural disasters using Twitter as a platform for gathering...
More than 80% of the 1.2 billion individuals without electricity live in rural regions of developing countries. For many of these communities, electricity access through the traditional paradigm of power infrastructure growth, increasing generation capacity of centralized grids and installing capital intensive transmission lines, substations, and distribution lines, will be financially infeasible...
Unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are promising assets to support rescue operations in natural or man-made disasters. Most UGVs and UAVs deployed in the field today depend on human operators and reliable network connections to the vehicles. However, network connections in challenged environments are often lost, thus control can no longer be exercised. In this paper,...
Solar direct-drive (SDD) appliances including refrigerators and freezers are widely used for storing vaccines and other medical products in locations without reliable mains electricity. The capacity of the solar array powering an SDD appliance must be large enough to provide sufficient compressor runtime during periods of reduced solar irradiance. SDD appliance solar arrays therefore create useful...
This paper presents the development and national deployment of hydro-meteorological monitoring devices, termed as HydroMet Stations, for flood warning and monitoring applications. We describe various challenges encountered during the course of implementation particularly those related to transportation, local logistics, location, and security. We also discussed lessons learned such as the early involvement...
The inherent geographic nature of displacement in refugee camps is requiring further use of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) technology for community-based information and asset management. Additionally, refugees have a fundamental need for livelihood development in host countries due to the protracted nature of displacement. This paper presents our work on the Refugee GIS or ‘RefuGIS’ project...
In efforts to achieve universal electricity access, geospatial factors, particularly the distribution of populated places and other electricity demands, are fundamentally important in determining the relative costs of competing grid, mini-grid or home system electrification options. Research presented here goes beyond broad metrics such as population density to instead consider patterns of aggregation...
We introduce the design, calibration, and validation of a wearable, wireless, and secure air quality monitoring sensor system that is integrated with a smartphone application and back-end server for realtime data collection. To this end, an Alphasense OPC-N2 optical air quality monitoring sensor was integrated with a wireless hardware platform and real-time smartphone application, which sent particulate...
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