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PopTech Recap: Mobile Enterprise

Marcia Stepanek | Thursday 29th October 2009

I'm back in New York from Maine, where I was attending PopTech's 2009 conference: America Reimagined. In going through my notes of last week's presentations by the more than 50 speakers -- entrepreneurs, academicians, inventors, artists and advocates -- four people [mostly PopTech fellows] were especially focused on finding ways to use cellphones to help those living at the Bottom of the Pyramid.

[PopTech organizers also tipped their hats to BoP projects; this year's attendee bags given to each conferee were BoP-friendly, developed by MIT architect Sheila Kennedy, who has helped spearhead PopTech's portable lighting project. The FLAP bag [for Flexible Light & Power] is a Timbuk2 messenger bag outfitted with small solar array, battery and LED. A removable panel lined with reflective material amplifies the light from a tiny bulb tucked into a strap. PopTech organizers said AfriGadget's Erik Hersman recently took some prototypes to Africa for field testing. The upshot? "Solar isn't just for rooftops and calculators anymore," says PopTech. Now you can literally wear power on your shoulder.]

Here's a brief summary of some of the BoP projects and their founders:

* FrontlineSMS:Medic: When founder and PopTech fellow Josh Nesbit traveled to Malawi in the summer of 2007 to intern at a hospital there, he was struck by the inadequacy of medical services in the region. "That hospital had two doctors attending to a quarter of a million people," recalls Nesbit, a Stanford pre-med student at the time. Further, healthcare workers had to travel dozens of miles to isolated African villages just to see patients, often having to lug boxes of medical records with them. Nesbit says he was at the hospital for six weeks before he met a single health care worker from the community, a man whose name was Dixon. "He opened his notebooks and there were beautifully handwritten drug adherence charts, but Dixon was walking 35 miles every day to the central clinic, just so the nurse could check his work," Nesbit said. So Nesbit bought 100 cell phones at $100 each and trained community health workers how to text-message each other and the clinic, instead -- transforming all of those paper records into texts that can quickly be sent from one cellphone to another. "All of a sudden, these remote community health workers were connected." Out of this effort came a change of career focus for Nesbit and the for-profit FrontlineSMS, a free, open-source software platform that enables large-scale, two-way text messaging using only a laptop, a GSM modem and inexpensive cell phones. At PopTech last week, Nesbit launched Phone Hope, a new drive to collect old and used cellphones from people in the States, recycle them, and use those credits buy new, more appropriate phones for health workers in Malawi, Bangladesh and distressed communities in the United States. "If we are able to recycle just one percent of discarded phones for one year, we could help clinics provide better health care to 50 million people," Nesbit says. Recycle your old phone and help health workers save lives.

* Hayat Sindi is a Saudi medical researcher, advocate for women and girls in science education, and founder of Diagnostics For All, a nonprofit that is creating point-of-care diagnostic devices micro-fabricated in paper. According to PopTech curator Andrew Zolli, these paper devices represent a "game-changing" technology for delivering low-cost medical care in the developing world. Sindi, born in Mecca into a family of 8 siblings, left home in her teens and -- not speaking a word of English -- eventually found her way into Kings College in Britain and received a scholarship to get a PhD in biotechnology from Cambridge. Three years ago, she moved to Harvard to work in a special scientific lab geared to social innovation. Out of that lab, Diagnostics for All was born. "Paper is very low-cost," Sindi says, "and it can be carried, folded and put in a pocket. It is safely disposable and requires only a minimum amount of tears, saliva, or urine to give results in seconds." The device works this way: A drop of bodily fluid is dropped onto the paper, and it reacts with chemicals built into wells embedded in the paper. The paper changes colors, depending on the presence or absence of, say, glucose or protein. Sindi says the first application of the technology will be used to spot liver damage, which she says is not being treated in the developing world. In the U.S., Sindi says, 5 percent of patients medicated for HIV develop liver failure; in the developing world, that figure jumps to 15 percent. "If we add TB [the number goes up to] 2.3 million patients who will die, not because of the disease but because of the side effects from the drugs meant to save them." Sindi also is known for being a powerful advocate for science education and careers for women in the Middle East: A few years ago, she was part of a group of Arab women who peddled for peace -- participating in a bicycle ride from Beirut to Ramallah intended "to send a message to world leaders to get on with it," Sindi said, "and stop the suffering that continuous conflict brings."

* Nigel Waller launched Movirtu in 2008 -- mortgaging his home to do it -- so as to build a company that will provide access to basic mobile phone services for people earning less than $2 a day. Under Nigel's leadership, Movirtu has designed a virtual mobile phone system which enables anyone to make and receive phone calls, text messages and mobile payments utilizing other people's phones. It's all about granting access to mobile communications even to those without their own phone, Waller says. How do they do it? Morvirtu uses so-called cloud computing -- which essentially, in this context, would offer portable mobile services to people much like electricity is provided from a grid. Given quick and simple access to "the cloud," Movirtu enables BoP populations to find work, build micro-enterprises, access health care and better support themselves and their families by having access to others and resources online via mobile phones. Prior to Morvirtu, Waller worked with a variety of blue-chip for-profit companies including Sema Group, Glenayre and Schlumberger, gaining extensive international experience in Sub-Sahara Africa, the Middle East, South Asia, Eastern Europe, and Latin America.

* Aydogan Ozcan, the chief of the Bio- and Nano-Photonics Laboratory at UCLA, is developing a way for health workers to detect infectious diseases using a cell phone, mostly by turning their phones into a kind of microscope that can be used to analyze blood samples from anywhere, any time. "This lets us do some extraordinary things," Ozcan says. "We can diagnose sickle-cell anemia, count cell signatures based on their texture, get complete blood counts and detect bacteria like E. coli in water, potentially avoiding contamination." The product is in early stages, he says. It works in the lab and a small number of prototypes are being field tested. "This technology has the potential to transform the delivery of medical services to the world's poorest populations," says Ozcan.

Watch this space for more highlights.

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