2010 Winners

e.quinox

Team Members

Mohammad Mansoor Hamayun (lead); Manuel Tragut; Alexander McLaren; Alexander Rybka; Christopher Baker-Brian; Christopher Hopper; Hemal Mehta; Laurent Van Houke; Matthew Dayton; Ndubuisi Kejeh; Thomas Luth; Varun Sharma

One of the major issues in developing countries is rural electrification. Due to socioeconomic reasons it is often not possible to implement a full-scale national electric grid. There is, however, a big demand for energy and electricity that needs to be met.

Currently many remote communities are without access to electrical power and enormous effort is undertaken in order to satisfy energy needs. Walks of several hours, multiple times per week are not uncommon to charge mobile phones or batteries.

Lighting is typically provided by kerosene lights and candles. Due to the long supply chain, the price of these goods has increased considerably by the time it reaches the end-user. Furthermore burning these substances indoors produces toxic smoke that is inhaled by the inhabitants. Because the dependence on sunlight the evening hours cannot be used for economic activities or education. In developing countries a significant amount of the family income is spent on its energy needs.

University

Imperial College London

Dr. Algae: Bio-indicator for heavy metal pollution alert & a rapid test system

Team Members

Wendian Shi (lead); Cheng-hao Chien; Yu Zhao; Hongchao Zhou; Beth Stauffer

Do you trust what you are drinking? Is water as clean as it seems? We drink water every day. However, an invisible killer may be hiding in the innocent-looking liquid: heavy metal pollution. Excessive levels of heavy metals, such as Cadmium, Mercury and Lead, could severely damage human organs, bring unbearable pain, and cause serious diseases, even cancers.

Heavy metal pollution in water is a global health threat. In 2006, Haina, Dominican Republic, the waste water from a factory caused lead poisoning of almost the whole local population, 85,000 victims. In developing countries (China, India, African counties, etc), countless cases emerge every day due to the growing industrialization, impose huge threat to the health of millions.

One critical problem is the lack of the alert system when pollution happens, so that humanity accidents that people drink contaminated water without alarm happen frequently. In 2009, nearly 1000 children in Fengxiang, China, were severely poisoned because of drinking lead polluted water over a year. Similar case happened in Mae Ku, Thailand, where 7,000 farmers were cadmium poisoned. The current methods for monitoring the heavy metal pollution, such as WHAM and NICA, are costly, making large scale implementation unrealistic. A low-cost and real-time alert technology to monitor the pollution is urgently needed to avoid such tragedies.

Herein, we propose using algae as the bio-indicator for heavy metal pollutions. Our portable test system can make early alerts by monitoring the characteristic responses of algae to the heavy metal pollutants in real-time and with low-cost.

University

California Institute of Technology / University of Southern California

PALAPA : Development of an Energy, Economy and Health Independent Region in Indonesia

Team Members

Mohammad Ikhsan (lead); Ramadhani Wahono; Giri Kuncoro; Ferdaus Ario Nurman

It was the generosity, the kindness, and the spirit from one man that sparked the beginning of this unforgettable journey. This man, the man we called Pak (Mr.) Mamo, sold noodles in our campus. Everyday, he would come to our student organization with the weight of his stove, ingredients, and, of course his noodles, all, carried on his shoulder. But, everyday he would come with his spirit and his smile. It was Pak Mamo who showed us that outside our campus wall, there were still thousands of villages who did not enjoy the basic infrastructures as those in our city. A two hour drive followed by two more hours on foot took us to his village in Garut, Indonesia. A village whose children still slept by candle light at night, whose sick had to travel the whole four hours to get proper health care, and did not have proper access to books and educational facility.

After our first visit there, we were determined to return for another visit. Next time, we would bring a change in the form of our project, PALAPA. Our project focused on solving the problems that many villages faced in Indonesia, poor infrastructures that include electricity, health care, sanitation and education. Overall, these problems affected the general welfare of the village and in Pak Mamo's village the welfare was very low. Through the implementation of multiple engineering disciplines, we were determined to increase the welfare of the village and the region around it.

University

Bandung Institute of Technology

Bedside Instrument for Pressure Ulcer Diagnosis – The Rubitect

Team Members

Sanna Gaspard

Pressure ulcers (PUs) are a health, and a quality of life problem that plagues the healthcare community and patients around the world. Pressure ulcer (PU) prevention is one of the greatest challenges faced by caregivers and long term care facilities. PUs appear primarily in hospitals, nursing homes, and among the elderly and in people with disabilities, paralysis, prosthetic limbs, peripheral nerve disorders, and those living with diabetes. PUs have an incidence rate ranging from 10-17% in acute care, 0-29% in home care, and 2.3-28% in institutional long-term care (LTC) [1]. The costs associated with healing PUs and worker productivity losses exceed $2 billion a year in America. The cost to heal a complex, full-thickness PU in 2006 was as much as $70,000; the cost for a less serious PU may range from $2000 to $30,000 [2]. Therefore PU management is focused on early detection and prevention. However, the subjective nature of the standard clinical diagnostic tools for PUs, tactile skin inspections and the visual observation of changes in skin make it difficult to accurately and reliably diagnosis early stage (stage -1) PUs. To address this problem I am developing a low cost easy to use point-of-care bedside instrument that can provide accurate and reliable layer by layer diagnosis of early stage PUs, independent of skin pigmentation, by acquiring visible and near IR light reflectance spectra from the skin at various depths as a function of applied pressure – providing a device-assisted quantitative PU diagnosis that will be reliable for all patients.

University

Carnegie Mellon University

Creating SMILES - building the nation

Team Members

Santosh Poudel (lead); Neelu Shrestha; Sibjan Chaulagain; Surya Thapa; Dhirendra Kumar Chaudhary

During the past years of painful internal conflicts, people had to leave their homes, jobs and properties. Large number of students left their studies uncompleted and many families lost their earning members. The last decade pushed our country, Nepal, backwards into the darkness of doomed economy, increasing poverty and deteriorating human rights records. Moreover, due to uneven landscapes in the rural places the government has been facing serious challenges trying to meet the ever increasing needs for basic facilities. This situation is proving to be a serious threat to the development of the country

These kinds of predicaments have created many pressing national issues needing immediate addressing. SMILES has outlined these as poverty, illiteracy, deteriorating human rights records and public health as well as the global issue of climate change affecting Nepal immensely.

We, the members of the SMILES team, want to do something ourselves in order to improve the future of the country, and not just wait for the government to take actions against these major problems. We are all engineering students at Tribhuwan University. Hence the most intriguing aspect of the project is the way we have formulated it. Creating SMILES - building the nation is all about Science, Engineering, Technology, Humanity and Prosperity. What we believe is that science, engineering and technology combined with social and economic perspectives of human lives will indeed create smiles and build the nation.

University

Tribhuwan University, Institute of Engineering, Western Region Campus