Grants Awarded for mHealth

The mHealth Alliance founded by the Rockefeller and Vodafone Foundations, the GSM Association, and the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation (Norad) have just announced third round winners for catalytic grants. The grants are being provided through the Innovation Working Group (IWG) to support the “Every Woman, Every Child” movement which aims to save the lives of 16 million women and children by 2015.

A total of ten mHealth projects in countries across Africa and Asia were selected to receive grants this year.  The grantees included:

  • FHI 360 (Kenya, Tanzania)—Funds for “Three Pathways to Scaling Mobile for Reproductive Health” (m4RH) will provide an automated interactive and on-demand SMS system to provide essential facts about contraceptive methods
  • Institute for Reproductive Health, Georgetown University (India)—Funds for “CycleTel: Scaling up the First Family Planning Method via Mobile Phones” will provide information      on family planning
  • John Snow, Inc. (Malawi)—Funds for “Scaling up cStock in Malawi: Using Data to Improve Access to Medicines in the Community” will use the system to report, manage, and monitor all community-level health products
  • Kenya Medical Research Institute (Kenya)—Funds for “Testing to Improve Testing (TextIT) Strategy: Text Messaging to Increase Postpartum Clinic Attendance and Rates of Early      Infant Diagnosis of HIV” was designed as an interactive two way text messaging intervention to deliver HIV related information
  • Ministry of Health Zanzibar, University of Copenhagen (Zanzibar)—Funds for “Wired Mothers” will provide for an automated SMS system to provide mothers with      unidirectional text messaging and a mobile phone voucher system to have access to emergency obstetric care and referral links from primary healthcare facilities to hospitals
  • PATH (Vietnam)—Funds for “Expanding the Reach of Immunization Registry In Vietnam” will create a digital immunization registry system
  • Pathfinder International (Nigeria)—Funds will help to scale up the use of CommCare, a mobile phone support application to improve the quality of maternal and child health services at primary health centers
  • Sesame Workshop (India)—Funds for “Building Communities of Change: A mobile-based Initiative” will expand their innovative radiophone program that use a community radio platform and combines it with mobile phones to help children
  • UNICEF-Uganda, NYU—Funds for “Empowering m-Citizens to Strengthen Maternal, Newborn, and Child Health” will use the U-report system to equip mobile phone users with the tools to establish and enforce new standards of transparency and accountability by using the data management system mTrac
  • WAHA International (Senegal)—Funds for “Improving Access to Maternal Healthcare through mHealth” will use an SMS campaign to education the community on the availability and benefits of maternal and child health services to reach      700,00 in the Tambacounda region of Senegal

Portable Hemodialysis System

In India, ten percent of adults nearly 75 million suffer from chronic kidney disease and it is estimated that there are nearly 200,000 new End Stage Renal Disease (ESRD) patients in the country requiring dialysis or kidney transplants every year. In spite of multiple efforts to decrease the high mortality and improve the quality of life of ESRD patients, several important infrastructure and economic barriers have prevented broader access to dialysis treatment in India. (more…)

Fyodor Awarded SBIR Grant

NSF has awarded Fyodor Biotechnologies located in Baltimore a SBIR Phase 2 grant for $729,000. The funds will help Fyodor develop a noninvasive multi-disease urine-based diagnostic test for Acute Febrile Illness (AFI) to help diagnosis leading global health diseases from a single urine specimen in patients with a fever. (more…)

Social Media Critical in Emergencies

Effectively integrating social media tools to meet the needs of emergency managers was the topic at a briefing held at the Woodrow Wilson International Center in Washington D.C. on October 4, 2013. Experts in the emergency management field voiced their opinions and thoughts on how social media can effectively help emergency managers. (more…)

Telemedicine Improves Asthma Care

For students, particularly students in lower-income areas, asthma is one of the leading causes of school absences according to data from CDC. Since 2006, the University of Rochester Medical Center (URMC) has worked with the Rochester City School District to try to improve asthma care for students. For close to a dozen years, URMC has been bringing telemedicine to city schools to allow offsite doctors to make quick diagnoses of sick students. (more…)

Wireless Health Hub Introduced

SoCal Entrepreneurial Ecosystems Development (SoCal EED), a non-profit corporation located in San Diego County, has introduced the Wireless Health Hub a new startup community for wireless health entrepreneurs, founders, investors, business leaders, and other health technology people who are developing wireless medical devices, personal health products and services, and health-related software applications. (more…)

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