Meet Seva Sustainable Sanitation, first place winner in the 2015 Wireless Innovation Project. Based at Caltech, founders Clement Cid and Cody Finke are developing a low-cost, remote monitoring and maintenance system for sanitation facilities.

Images of open sewers are commonly used to depict one of the most challenging infrastructure issues of our time, one that’s impacting 2.5 billion people globally and has a wide-ranging impact on health, environment, and livelihood.

NGOs and government agencies have long focused on implementation of new sanitation technologies without a clear go-to strategy on monitoring and maintaining those systems. PhD students in Environmental Science and Engineering respectively, Cid and Finke noticed an opportunity in addressing the lack of cheap, efficient toilets but also the skills needed for repair and upkeep within local communities, especially in remote, rural areas.

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Life cannot exist without water, but 748 million people today have no access to an improved water source, according to the World Health Organization. The physical results of this are staggering—600,000 children die to diarrheal diseases caused by unsafe drinking water.

Paradoxically, 2.3 billion people gained access to improved drinking water between 1990–2012 … so why hasn’t the problem been solved? The reason is clear in this startling illustration—in sub-Saharan Africa alone, one-third of rural water systems fail. The systems are there, but fall into disrepair or operate inefficiently. Monitoring rural infrastructure is expensive and time-consuming. As a result, 99% of WASH (water, sanitation and hygiene) projects lack long-term monitoring infrastructure.

WellDone International, led by Executive Director Austin McGee, CTO Tim Burke and Operations and Finance Lead Ben Armstrong, developed a solution to fill the gap in monitoring and maintaining water systems. Their mission is to build technology and tools that empower resource-constrained communities with the data they need to provide critical infrastructure that lasts.

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Meet Mobile Stethoscope Diagnostics, third place winner in the 2015 Wireless Innovation Project. Based at the MIT D-Lab, founders Rich Fletcher and Daniel Chamberlain developed a low-cost pulmonary disease diagnostic platform implemented on a mobile phone.

Pulmonary disease (which includes asthma, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, pneumonia, lung cancer and tuberculosis) is a particularly large burden in developing countries due to a lack of air quality regulation. This can result in an abundance of air pollution from smoking and cooking on fire stoves, for example, which ultimately produces respiratory problems for people living in these areas. In addition, poor access to health care and affordable screening tools for early detection exacerbates the conditions once they start. More →