Problems
UI/UX design support provided by Azavea
Overflow App for Android-based Huawei IDEOS smartphone [Tanzania]
Updated 3 weeks 1 day ago
Ask:
Adapt an existing Android application (such as Ushahidi or FLOW) to allow citizens and urban planning students of Tandale, an unplanned neighborhood of Dar Es Salaam, to report overflowing road side drains and culverts.
On hand at the Water Hackathon in DC and London, we will have Android-based Huawei IDEOS smartphone (the cheapest smartphone in the world). The day after the hackathon, we will fly with the phones (uploaded w/ the awesome applications that you create) and immediately put the phones to use for data collection.
The reports will go to the Ramani Tandale Ushahidi instance, and will be used to introduce citizen voice into an upcoming $75 million World Bank urban infrastructure upgrading project in Dar Es Salaam.
Background:
Roughly 70% of Dar Es Salaam, one of the fastest growing cities in the world, is unplanned. These areas lack paved roads, drainage systems, and solid waste collection points. The World Bank, working with the Dar Es Salaam City Council, is preparing to improve urban infrastructure, but needs the help of citizens and urban planning students to identify where road side drainage is clogged, overflowing and needing repair.
A network of students and residents already exists in Tandale, one of the target wards for this projects. In August, they created a base layer map that is accessible on Open Street Map. These groups are keen to put to use mobile applications that help make the base map more accessible and useful.
Help people do separate collection of rubbish
Updated 3 weeks 1 day ago
Problem
Nowadays pollution is one of the most important ambiental problem in the world.
During the last years doing separate collection of rubbish has seemed to be the right solution, but it still difficult for a normal citizen to get used make it right.
Goal
This problem is about building a software that helps people to thow away rubbish in a "green way".
Plus
The software should use mobile devices in order to be more effective in daily life.
It should be able to give advices based on a database collecting information such as: picture, description and category.
PhoneSat: Android Apps in Space
Updated 3 weeks 2 days ago
Challenge Description
This challenge is a chance to be a part of kick-starting the public’s access to space. PhoneSat is a low-cost Cubesat using a Google Nexus Smartphone running the open source Android platform as the main processor. Our challenge for you is to create an Android App that utilizes PhoneSat’s capabilities.
The App that you create should be designed to run during a dedicated mission phase lasting approximately one orbit (90 minutes); you could choose to use any portion or all of this time. During this phase you would have access to all of the phone sensors: magnetometer, gyroscope, and accelerometer in addition to the PhoneSat sensors and controls: thermometer, reaction wheels, magnetorquer boards, and solar panel current. You could also utilize any of PhoneSat’s existing capabilities (see below). For access to the PhoneSat sensors and capabilities, simply leave a comment line and the PhoneSat wrapping software does the rest.
Focus Apps
You can submit any App that meets the technical requirements identified above. But we are particularly interested in the following Apps:
1. **Star Tracker App.** Use the phone’s camera to take pictures of the stars and, in an automated way, determine the direction that the camera is facing based on the star field. This would greatly improve the accuracy of the attitude determination and control system providing a platform for a wider variety of experiments.
2. **Fire Locator App.** Use the phone’s camera to take pictures of the earth and then search for fires (probably based on the smoke trails). This could serve as an aid in natural disaster determination and relief.
3. **Attitude Determination App**. Use the magnetometers, sun sensors (solar arrays), accelerometers, and rate gyros to determine the satellite’s attitude state. Aim for +-1 deg per rotational axis.
4. **3-Axis Control App. ** Use the magnetorquers and/or reaction wheels to demonstrate 3-axis control. Aim for +-5 deg per rotational axis.
5. **Radiation Monitor App.** Use the phone’s camera to monitor radiation.
6. **Single Event Upset (SEU) Detector App.** Known in computing as a Soft Error, an SEU detector App would increase the PhoneSat systems’ reliability.
PhoneSat Capabilities
PhoneSat has the following primary capabilities that you could utilize: 3-axis attitude determination and control, Microhard MHX2420 transceiver, and a camera. The phone communicates with the satellite’s systems via a serial port.
Application Environment
Your model testing environment will be in space so there are a few environmental conditions to consider. These conditions will alter the performance of PhoneSat’s sensors. Half of your testing orbit will be in eclipse, which will be responsible for a thermal cycle. Atmospheric drag will be the primary source of attitude disturbance. The Earth’s magnetic field at the orbit altitude would have a similar magnitude to that at sea level. Finally, the satellite may be tumbling with the determination of an approximate attitude.
Quake Felt Report
Updated 3 weeks 2 days ago
Crowd sourced earthquake intensity maps provide disaster managers with real-time information on the intensity of earthquakes while also giving earthquake researchers valuable data to help estimate the shaking from future earthquakes. The Geoscience Australia Felt Report website and the USGS "Did you feel it" website are good examples of such crowd sourced maps. However these maps are tailored for the web browser on desktop computers.
The goal is to create a smartphone app that will allow users to report earthquake shaking intensity and building damage information via their smartphone. This would entail creating an earthquake felt report form in which the users answers a set of questions of the level of shaking and damage to the building they are in. This information is then geolocated using the smartphones GPS and submitted to a database. The earthquake intensity and damage information is then displayed on a webmap for real-time analysis by disaster managers and the public.
Seed Swap App
Updated 3 weeks 2 days ago
Seed saving is an important part of traditional farming. Farmers, both commercial growers and hobbyists, spend time observing their crops and choose to save seeds from plants that cultivate the characteristics for their growing conditions and desired outcomes. This creates diversity in agriculture and helps farmers keep costs down by not having to buy seed every year.
This is a particularly pressing issue right now since it has become legal to patent seeds and now a handful of companies own the majority of available seed. In several parts of the world it's even become illegal for farmers to save and sell their own seeds. In addition, much of the seed available for purchase is sterile (meaning it won't reproduce), hybrid (meaning it can't be saved and resown because the next generation will not be the same as the first), or genetically modified. It's extremely important that we preserve the ability for farmers to save seed and help them find other farmers to swap with.
Objective:
- Give "farmers" (professional or hobbyists) access to a database where they can list what seeds they have to trade and access what seeds others have to trade.
- They should be prompted to add background information about the seed including their growing region, and any specifics on the quality of the crop including recommendations for germination, sowing, care and harvesting.
- It would also be nice to include tips on how to save seeds from a variety of plants. Give farmers a way to make the trade (mail? in person?)
Sheltr :: for basic human needs
Updated 3 weeks 2 days ago
In Philadelphia, homelessness is a major problem. However, the technology has not scaled to fill this need. Providing services to the homeless population is a very inefficient and time-consuming process.
The goal of the application is to highlight life-preserving resources for the homeless and homeless service providers, particularly food and shelter resources.
Our solution highlights food and shelter resources in Philadelphia, with each resource marked with appropriate icons. It is an easily searchable, easily maintainable mapped listing of homeless shelters and free food resources in Philadelphia.
Our mobile-friendly site is up at http://philly.sheltr.org/, and can be extended for other cities. Our code is available at https://github.com/phillyshelter.
Helping Kids with Diabetes
Updated 3 weeks 2 days ago
There here are many food apps out there already, calorieking.com, gomeals.com, etc. There are apps for blood sugars as well. I would like an app that would collect blood sugars and put them in a format that is easy to read and fax or email but there is already a meter that does this.
Another option would be something for exercise, telling children how to increase food and decrease insulin but there are so many variables with this. That is the problem. Kids with diabetes need to test their blood sugar levels at least 4 times/day, before each meal and at bedtime. They also need to check if they feel “funny” as this means that they are too high or too low. They need to take insulin before they eat any food with carbs in it. They need to count the carbs and then enter them into the pump and also need to enter in the blood sugar level so that the pump can tell them how much insulin they need. Exercise makes the blood sugar level go down and food makes it go up.
MONITORING PUBLIC BUDGETS
Updated 3 weeks 3 days ago
Citizen oversight of public funds and investment projects could increase qualitatively if given access to existing databases on finance and procurement. However, understanding this requires advanced technical knowledge.
Peru there are fairly reliable databases on various aspects of finance and public procurement projects, but they are not user friendly. We would like to develop tools to combine data on budget execution, public procurement and investment projects, etc., to make it easier for citizens to understand, or provide alerts to users about changes in relevant projects and companies (for example: the municipality, or the work being done in their neighbourhoods).
Context: Financial transparency has seen significant progress in Peru in the last decade, however, there are limits on the ability of users to frequently access and understand the information. Peru has recently signed the Alliance for Open Government, and there is a commitment to make information more accessible. We believe we can build on this commitment and achieve a technological solution in order to institutionalize the value respect.
Audience: Mainly members of the Proética Anti-corruption Network, which currently reaches more than 4,000 activists interested in all the regional capitals of the country. They are constantly demanding better tools to make the information available.
Granular Health Map
Updated 3 weeks 4 days ago
Using mapping services allows health system workers to better understand the whole of the systems in which they work. In order for that mapping to be useful, it needs to have enough granularity of information. Currently when you want to add information about health system structures to OpenStreetMap, your only option is to add a "hospital" which is an insufficient level of detail. OpenStreetMap doesn't allow for mapping health systems with enough granularity; everything is a "Hospital".
Let’s work with Open Street Maps to define with more granularity the different levels of a health system so that Volunteers and their counterparts can map the health services available in their country. At least 4 levels are needed:
- Advanced Hospital
- Basic Hospital
- Health Post
- Health Hut
Additionally, there should be fields that allow you to add more information about the health structures:
- Ambulance (Y/N)
- Operating Block (Y/N)
- CD4 testing (Y/N)
- Size of catchment area
- Private or Public
- Staffing: Doctors, Nurses, Midwives, Community Health Workers, etc.
Lastly, there should be a way to map the catchment zone of the health facility.
How can we use electronic medical records in low-resource environment to improve health outcomes?
Updated 3 weeks 4 days ago
Digital health information promises great improvements in patient care. Healthcare depends greatly on reliable information transmission, so empowering providers to use the products of the information age – computers, networks and mobile devices –promises great productivity and efficacy gains. However, in developed countries, it has so far had little demonstrable benefit because the paper-based systems they are replacing happen to perform their tasks, albeit at a high cost, rather well. Even in rich countries like the US, studies of the few hospitals that have transitioned to electronic health records (EHRs) have showed no significant improvement in their ability to meet best-practice standards and to reduce length of stay. However, many initiatives are underway to digitize health information in the developed world, The Obama administration in the US, for example, will soon be spending more than US $ 100 billion towards developing and incentivizing the use of EHRs. The thought is that, like other networked scenarios such as the Internet, the value of EHRs will grow substantially as more and more institutions digitize their information.
In the developing world, the story is markedly different. Faced with the task of improving health information here for our poor citizens, developing countries are choosing to leap over the stage of developing costly robust paper-based systems in favor of EHRs. India, with a robust IT industry but poor health information, is ideally placed to make that jump.
We are proposing to go further. We will create a health information system that will perform the logistics of patient tracking, store patient information as well as enhance delivery in the field where there is low connectivity and electricity supply. We propose to improve the quality of care by providing up-to-date relevant information as well as colleague consultations to clinicians performing diagnosis and treatment.