Water: we’re all made of it, we all need it to survive – yet, more than 3 million people around the word die from water-related diseases every year. How do we solve this problem? Simple: make it entirely accessible for people we call “citizen scientists” to determine whether or not their water, and the water the community around them drinks, is actually drinkable.

Many times in developing areas of the world, access to trained professionals and the complex, high-power technologies they use to identify clean water is difficult to access and deploy. Enter MoboSens. Our product offers a great solution to this problem and eliminates the costs associated with the activities that were previously limited to a select few. With MoboSens, anyone who has access to a cell phone can identify safe drinking water by putting a single droplet onto our nanotechnology censor that plugs into the phone’s audio jack. We really do make it that simple.

Our goal when entering the Vodafone Americas Foundation Wireless Innovation Project was to secure additional funding to help bring this technology to more deserving and curious citizen scientists around the world. As a result of winning the WIP in 2013, MoboSens has expanded its product manufacturing efforts. In fact, we’ve partnered with an industrial manufacturer to scale up the manufacturing process and will soon realize our goal of putting more devices into the market.

As our team at MoboSens continues to grow, we are excited for upcoming product expansions, as well as some local initiatives we’ll be conducting in the Midwest United States. We cannot help but feel honored to have been selected as a WIP winner and grateful for all of the promising opportunities the recognition has presented our team with. We look forward to the day when the whole world is better equipped to identify safe drinking water. When that day comes, we’ll be glad to have had a helping hand in making it possible, in large part thanks to the Vodafone Americas Foundation.