Smartphones are becoming and important tool in helping underserved populations improve their healthcare, citizen groups increase their reach, small entrepreneurs improve their businesses, and much more. Six UW projects – all connected to real users – are tackling some interesting problems for which existing commercial products are inadequate, inflexible, or just too expensive. In the ‘Designing Technology for Resource-Constrained Environments‘ course CSE and HCDE students teamed up over the winter and spring quarters. First, HCDE students took the lead in developing project ideas and their requirements. Then, CSE students took those project ideas to working prototypes. Below are links to the posters from the project demos.
Global 2 Local Helping health clinics coordinate interpreter services for the over 60 languages spoken in the SeaTac community (with the Global2Local program from the Washington Global Health Alliance, Swedish Hospital, HealthPoint, and the King County Dept. of Public Health). http://change.washington.edu/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/g2l_poster_spring_20...
Milk Bank A low-cost sensor (built from UW’s FoneAstra) for guiding the flash-heat pasteurization of human breast milk to eliminate HIV (with PATH – a large local NGO with activities in many countries). http://change.washington.edu/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/milkbank_poster_fina...
ODK Tables A new tool in the Open Data Kit suite developed at UW, allows the SMS population and queries of an on-phone database and presents a phone-optimized table viewing interface (intended to lower the barrier to entry by providing an alternative to cloud-hosted servers). http://change.washington.edu/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/ODKTablesPoster.pdf
Nature Mapping Extensions to ODK Collect (a tool in Open Data Kit) to allow data collection and decision support to extract choices from a database (local or remote) based on data already entered – think advanced field guide (with the Nature Mapping project in UW’s Dept. of Forestry). http://change.washington.edu/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/NatureMappingPoster....
Water Use Using low-power sensing to precisely determine the pattern and duration of water gathering activities in rural Ethiopia (in collaboration with Prof. J. Cook, an economist in the Evans School). http://change.washington.edu/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/WuhaGizePosterFinal1...
Paper 2 Digital Using smartphone cameras to translate optical mark forms to spreadsheets automatically (a Gates Foundation funded project with VillageReach – a local NGO working in health clinics in Mozambique). http://change.washington.edu/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/p2d_poster-final-tho...
Find out more at http://change.washington.edu/2011/07/uw-students-design-smartphone-apps-for-...