Projects
From Change
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Health Care
CommCare
| CommCare is a project to aid community Health Workers (CHWs), who are the first--and often only--medical professionals that people see in rural areas of low-income countries. People living in extreme poverty often delay seeking care until it is too late for them to be helped. CHWs make house hold visits to provide very basic care. However, for CHWs to provide effective care, they must keep track of a great deal of information, from patient records to remembering follow up visits. CommCare is software that we are developing to run on mobile phones to aid CHWs with planning and performing their job.
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e-IMCI
| e-IMCI is a project to put the IMCI child health protocols onto a PDA to improve service delivery at the point of care. An initial pilot suggests that the software leads to better adherence to the IMCI protocol. We are now in the process of running a larger validation study to gather even more data. This project is part of a larger effort to bring evidenced based medicine to front line health workers in rural areas of low-income regions.
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OpenMRS
| Open Medical Records System (OpenMRS) is an application which enables design of a customized medical records system with no programming knowledge. It is a common framework upon which medical informatics efforts in developing countries can be built. Mobile devices due to size, connectivity and power management are more practical for entering and retrieving data in these remote settings and we are working on tools to enable this functionality with OpenMRS.
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OpenROSA
| OpenROSA is a consortium formed to create open source, standards-based tools for mobile data collection, aggregation, analysis, and reporting. By developing open source solutions and conforming to standards based on the XForms specification, our different projects can easily share code, data, ideas and infrastructure. JavaROSA is a project from the consortium we are involved in.
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Information Systems
CAM
| CAM is a mobile application framework designed for the needs of the rural developing world. Leveraging the existing ubiquity of paper records, CAM functions are accessed by capturing barcodes on paper forms using the mobile phone camera, or by entering numeric strings with the keypad. Supporting one-step navigation, direct linkage to paper practices, and offline multimedia-based interaction; CAM is specifically adapted for rural device, user and infrastructure constraints. Using CAM, we have implemented an accounting system for SHGs - a form of microfinance group in India. We have also implemented applications for agricultural cooperatives, including for organic certification and for automatic supply chain processes.
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Karatasi
| There is a widespread need for tracking and reporting of data generated in the developing world. This data is often captured on paper forms that serve as the information store for many organizations. These groups are often required to generate reports and make evidence based decisions – tasks which paper does not enable. While tools such as Excel and Access are sometimes used, they are often not powerful enough to meet the data needs for many organizations. Many users also find it hard to use these tools to create easy to use systems for tracking and reporting on data. Karatasi is software framework that hopes to address this problem.
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ProducerMIS
| Small-scale farming is the norm rather then the exception in much of the developing world. One way that smallholders can achieve economies of scale and acquire the latest knowledge is through the action of producer organizations. These can be structured as agricultural cooperatives, producer companies, or as informal associations of farmers. The Producer MIS is an integrated, open source software package supporting the operations of all types and scales of producer organizations.
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Education
Digital Study Hall
| Digital Study Hall (DSH) is a research project that seeks to improve education for the poor children in slum and rural schools in India. In a nutshell, think of its technical approach as the educational equivalent of Netflix + YouTube + Kazaa.
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Classroom Presenter for the XO
| The Classroom Presenter for the XO is an extension of the original Classroom Presenter tool that enables students and teachers to collaboratively engage in classroom lesson plans using XO laptops. Teachers use Classroom Presenter to load a slide deck on the XO, and the slides are then distributed to each student's XO as they join. Each student can make notes and changes to the slides, which have prompts and questions, by adding digital ink. Students can then submit their changes to the teacher, and the teacher can present submissions to the class for discussion. Our site and wiki are the go-to places for up to date information about the project.
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Income Generation
Empower Artists
| Empower Artists has teamed up with SIFE, a Heritage University group, to allow artisans in remote regions to sell their art to the world. We will offer a field kit that universities can use to record information on local art and create product listings on our e-commerce website. This site will provide artists with access to a wider range of customers and a chance for increased compensation. By focusing on artists' personal stories, we hope to foster a relationship between artist and customer that will lend insight and meaning to each piece of art.
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Infrastructure
über-router
| For network administrators who must manage the common low bandwidth, high-latency, intermittent connections in low-income regions, providing users the "best" (or even adequate) service is a nontrivial problem. While optimizing throughput is important, we argue that latency is an important and often ignored component of network performance. The intrinsically high latencies seen in the developing world are exacerbated by excessive queueing from traffic patterns which often swamp links with miss-sized queues. We are currently building firmware to address these problems on commercially available hardware.
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*bus
| *bus (Starbus) is a project that aims to provide reliable transportation in Kyrgyzstan by providing riders with reliable bus route data. Currently, riders in Kyrgyzstan have no idea when their buses will arrive and may have to wait for long periods of time. With the *bus system, buses in Kyrgyzstan will have a GPS module installed that relays location information over SMS to a central server. Riders can then use SMS to query where their buses are and when they are expected to arrive at a certain location.
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AIR+
| The purpose of AIR+ is to promote gender equality in developing countries by enhacing women’s ability to have their voices heard on the air. Through AIR (Advanced Interactive Radio – conceived by Revi Sterling at the University of Colorado), women can record their voices in a sound clip and potentially have the message broadcast when it reaches the local radio station. AIR+ seeks to extend the current implementation by allowing women to create “virtual radio stations” on various topics and thereby avoid issues of censorship.
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MySMS
| MySMS is a development framework to allow cellphones to easily interface with a remote database via SMS messages. Because SMS is a ubiquitous protocol, it is our hope that MySMS will serve as a catalyst for the creation of connected applications in developing regions. MySMS could serve as the underlying structure for applications in areas such as precision farming, health care, commerce, and microfinance.
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