innovation

The Indian Minister of Human Resource and Development, Mr. Kapil Sibal, released a $35 (Rs. 1500) tablet computer last week. The touch screen device has been designed and developed by experts from Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur (IITK) and Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore. The device was conceived 5 years ago as a response to XO, One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) Foundation’s laptop, which is currently priced at $199. Is it another feather in the cap of the Indian innovators, who earlier produced a $2,200 car and $16 water purifier?

The device based on the Linux platform comes with a number of applications such as video conferencing application, a multimedia content viewer, Open Office suite and media player. It also sports a USB drive. Keeping in mind the infrastructure challenges of developing countries, a solar panel has been included in the device. The price of $35 includes the cost of manufacturing the device abroad. The cost of the solar panel has, however, not been factored. The government has already decided to provide a discount of 50% to educational institutes, which will make the device as affordable as a basic mobile handset at $18.

This post first appeared on the Global Health Ideas blog. It has been cross-posted with their permission.

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This is a guest post by Preethi Sundararaman, summer associate working with the FEC Healthcare for All team at Ashoka.

It is a known fact that childhood obesity is on the rise, affecting one third of American children today. Alarmingly, researchers are predicting that for the first time in U.S. history, children may have a shorter life expectancy than their parents.

On July 13th, I attended the “Innovation, Information and Technology for Better Health Outcomes” conversation event held at World Bank. Todd Park, the Chief Technology Officer of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and co-founder of Athenahealth Inc., was one of three panelists at the event.

A key theme Park brought up was the impact technology and social media could have on healthcare for younger generations. “What if FarmVille were HealthVille?” Park asked. FarmVille, a real-time farm simulation game, has acquired 75 million Facebook users just within a year of being available. If games with the potential to reach this many were designed around health data, generations to come could grow up being more health conscious.

And how can we recognize it when it happens instead of just throwing it away?

That's the subject of a recent article in Wired Magazine—"Accept Defeat: The Neuroscience of Screwing Up"—which explores how usual behaviors and even our own brains tend to stand in the way of recognizing good things in unexpected results.  Writer Jonah Lehrer introduces us to Kevin Dunbar, a researcher who studies, of all things, scientists—"how they fail and how they succeed."  Though Dunbar's research focuses on scientists, the lessons are remarkably appropriate for inventors and social entrepreneurs.

Kevin Dunbar: "The problem with science, then, isn’t that most experiments fail — it’s that most failures are ignored."  Image source: Wired

Here are a few lessons from the article—How to Learn From Failure:

One of my favorite Ashoka Fellows of all time is Bart Weetjens, founder of APOPO. Obsessed with rodents while growing up, Bart soon discovered that they have an uncanny sense of smell and that they can be trained.  So through his organization he started by training rats to detect landmines and he has found that rats are more effective than dogs in detecting them, and because their weight is so light, rats don't set off the mines. His model is gaining so much popularity that even the Colombian government has adopted it.

And our furry friends' story doesn't end there; Bart is originally Belgian and in Flemish Tuberculosis means "disease that smells bad." He asked himself: "would the rat's sense of smell be powerful enough to detect tuberculosis?" And indeed his team found that it was, and they also found that rats were faster and more accurate at detecting tuberculosis than a regular lab. You can see the technical reports for the laboratory testing here.

Here are five of our favorite blogs on invention and technology for social good in Africa:

1. Afrigadget

2. Timbuktu Chronicles

3. Appfrica

4. White African

5. the African Uptimist

What are your favorite blogs? Let us know.

Image of locally invented welding maching by flickr/whiteafrican