Innovative technology has the potential to save lives, and wireless technologies hold a special promise for vexing global problems.  In some resource-limited areas, access to reliable wireless service is among the only infrastructure platforms available.

That’s why the Vodafone Americas Foundation™ was delighted to give away more than $700,000 through our first Wireless Innovation Project™, a competition that identifies and funds unique innovations using wireless related technology offering the best potential to address critical social issues around the world.

Too often promising social innovations languish because they don’t have a platform for effective and efficient delivery.  We designed the competition to encourage cross-disciplinary cooperation within universities and encouraged non-governmental organizations and non-profits to apply. We also wanted to add the private sector rigor to the process of competing—a daunting online application forced teams to challenge academic and theoretical assumptions with real-world data. More →

Today, the three winners of the Vodafone Wireless Innovation Project™ have been announced. The three winning innovations will share in prizes totaling up to $700,000 USD to support their next phase of advancement and implementation.

The winners are:

• Energy Harvesting Active Networked Tags (EnHANTs) for Disaster Recovery Applications – A system that uses wireless devices to track and locate survivors trapped by fires and structural collapse. The system is based on energy harvesting tags using ultra low power communications. Developed by Professors Gil Zussman, Peter Kinget, Ioannis (John) Kymissis, Dan Rubenstein, and Xiaodong Wang of Columbia University.
• CelloPhone – A lensfree imaging platform on a cellphone for disease detection and diagnostics usingdigital holograms of the cells or bacteria, that is capable of monitoring HIV, malaria, tuberculosis and various other diseases. Developed by Dr. Aydogan Ozcan, Dr. Neven Karlovac and Dr. Yvonne Bryson of the University of California at Los Angeles.
• CellScope: Mobile Microscopy for Disease Diagnosis – Transforms a conventional cell phone into a compact, high-resolution, handheld microscope with the capability of on-site disease diagnosis and wireless transmission of patient data to clinical centers for remote diagnosis & treatment. Developed by Dr. Daniel Fletcher, Dr. Erik Douglas and Dr. Wilbur Lam of the University of California at Berkeley. More →