Each year about 15 million babies are born prematurely and over one million of these babies die, making preterm birth the leading cause of infant mortality. In developed communities, these premature babies are often given a chance to thrive by spending their first days in neonatal intensive care units (NICUs) of hospitals. But in many parts of the world, birth happens in a rural village far away from hospitals and it is impossible for pregnant mothers to make the trip once labor has begun.

Nearly three years ago, our team began tackling the challenge of preterm birth by developing a new type of intravaginal device that enables earlier detection of preterm birth. This “SMART Diaphragm” would use sensors to capture data about a pregnant woman’s cervix over time and transmit that data wirelessly to a cloud platform that would determine whether a woman is likely to give birth preterm. Since then, we have successfully developed more than 10 prototypes of the device and have worked with 20 women in clinical studies who have graciously given us permission to track them throughout pregnancy using our device. More →

For citizens of the developed world, the process of transferring, saving and managing money is as simple as visiting one of many bank branches near us or by using a debit card. Making purchases, obtaining loans and establishing credit enable us to purchase a home, start a business or send funds to relatives. In Kenya and many other developing countries, this process is much more difficult.

Without the baseline infrastructure that many of us take for granted, such as an extensive road and highway system or postal service, shipping goods or cash is a risky process. FrontlineSMS:Credit developed our software, PaymentView, for exactly this audience. Leveraging mobile payment systems and existing banking software, we are bringing financial services, including savings, credit, insurance and payroll, to those that traditional banking systems do not reach. Our mission is to effect social change and facilitate transactions in a way that previously wasn’t possible. More →

Vaccines can play a life-saving role in preventing serious illnesses, including devastating childhood diseases like polio. But if they are not shipped, stored or monitored properly, they can lose potency or spoil altogether. For the developing countries, this challenge is a critical one as the nearly 1 in 5 children that are not vaccinated are concentrated within their borders.

Both government entities, such as national health ministries, and individual medical clinics are realizing just how challenging it is to track and monitor the quality of one of their most important resources: vaccines. For many low-resourced rural clinics, a staff member might have to literally be in the same room as a cold storage unit to see if it’s working or not. NexleafAnalytics has created a temperature-monitoring sensor, called ColdTrace, which remotely alerts personnel if a temperature change threatens the vaccines being stored there. More →

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. More →