From Fog Harvesting to Drone Disaster Communications: Meet the Vodafone Foundation Wireless Innovation Finalists

From Fog Harvesting to Drone Disaster Communications: Meet the Vodafone Foundation Wireless Innovation Finalists

This month Vodafone announced the eight finalists of The Wireless Innovation Project Competition, the top three will take home a piece of the $500,000 grant. We were invited to join the panel of judges to review the final eight and the process was incredibly inspiring – challenging to pick only three final recipients. The winners will be announced during the Social Innovation Summit 2014 being held at the United Nations Plaza, May 28-29.

Meet the eight finalists below and find more info on each on Vodafone’s site:

• Cellular System for Emergency and Disaster Relief [Washington University at St. Louis]. Uses unmanned aerial vehicles to patch together cellular access in the wake of tsunamis, hurricanes and earthquakes so victims can contact safety personnel.

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• eyeMITRA [MIT Media Lab] provides real-time health assessment using a mobile phone attachment that scans the nervous tissue in the back of the eye and provides remote imaging of the retina.

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• FogFinder  [Faculty of engineering researchers at MIT, Universidad de los Andes, and Universidad Católica de Chile] uses a probe powered by wireless communication tech, that provides a map of liquid water flux in arid regions of Chile. This will help Chileans find new, renewable sources of water.

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• MIMOSA Emergency Response establishes an integrated satellite, cellular, and web-based network for communicating and coordinating health and disaster response needs anywhere in the world.

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• Mobile Multimodal Colposcopy [Scripps Medical Clinic] enables any mobile phone with a digital camera to serve clinicians as a multimodal cervical cancer screening device.

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• Soko Enterprise Project  gives marginalized SMEs the platform they need to manage production, operations, selling to global customers and payment – all through mobile technology.

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• Speaklear, Automatic Evaluation and Treatment of Pathological Speech Disorders [Arizona State University] gives underserved communities access to a speech recognition mobile platform that can assess communication disorders and treatment remotely.

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• TaroWorks™, Accelerating Social Impact in the Last Mile TaroWorks lets organizations working in low connectivity areas have access to real-time work data and connect to the head office while in the field.

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Learn more about how businesses and non-profits use Twilio for social good by visiting Twilio.org