The 2009 Lemelson-MIT Award for Sustainability goes to the creator of a Disease Monitoring and Immunization Management software for mobile phones.
One of the many prizes awarded by MIT through its numerous programs is the Lemelson MIT Award for Sustainability, which recognizes the efforts of scientists or inventors who endeavor to find solutions that will help humanity progress within a framework of respect for the environment and of assistance to the underprivileged, especially through the improvement of basic areas such as health and education.
The prize is awarded to those specific products or technological processes that collectively meet the following criteria:
- Improve human development.
- Improve human impact on the environment.
- Adapt to short-term environmental changes, which will primarily affect vulnerable communities with fewer resources.
These changes include air and water quality or soil pollution. Health, energy, agriculture, housing, biodiversity, or the administration of ecosystems are other fundamental aspects that will affect the jury’s decision.
The prize awarded will be 100,000 $, as well as the recognition that goes along with appearing in the corresponding publications and in media specialized in science and technology.
The winner of the 2009 edition was Dr. Joel Selanikio, Pediatrics professor at Georgetown University Hospital in Washington D.C. His invention is called EpiSurveyor, and he came up with the idea for his creation while working at centers for Disease Prevention and Control Centers (CDC), where he realized that current programs for the monitoring and immunization of diseases are carried out on paper, making them environmentally unfriendly, more burdensome to manage and, generally, slower.
This moved him to create a free, open-code software program especially meant for mobile phone use by professionals in the health sector.
Registration for the 2010 edition is already open, but aspiring candidates must be nominated by others.
3 de June, 2009 - 3:33 am
This is great stuff. The one thing about mobile phones for health is the lack of evidence in it’s use. Some things clearly work well, however, there are tons of experiments and trials going on that are hard to keep a track off.