Wednesday, April 6, 2011

Student team TTHV heading to Imagine Cup finals

By Rodney H. Brown

When Microsoft Inc. holds the national finals of its Imagine Cup in Redmond, Wash., this coming weekend, one finalist team of students will represent New England colleges, with a plan to tap into the ubiquitous nature of cell phones in the developing world to increase use of available health care.

The team known as TTHV, or Texting Toward Healthier Villages, was born out of the experiences of siblings Annie and Alex Ryu. Annie is a sophomore social anthropology major at Harvard College and her brother Alex is a senior economics major at the University of Pennsylvania. Last summer, according to Annie, the two were in separate internships on opposite sides of the globe – she was in Nicaragua working on child health issues and he was in India, working to help the financing methodology of the Karuna Trust, a non-governmental organization which runs health care centers there.

“We were in touch a lot about what we were working on, and one thing he noticed was that everyone in India seemed to have a cell phone,” Annie said.

That led the two siblings to come up with a possible solution for something else Alex noticed – that vaccination rates for follow-up vaccines at the centers fell way off, mainly because the Indian mothers using the Karuna centers would forget about the follow-up appointment. Why not use their ever-present cell phones to remind them of appointments for themselves and their children?

“One thing we wanted to start with was sending text reminders of children’s care appointments and children’s vaccinations,” Annie said. “Once you entered in a mother’s data and the birth dates of all her children, she would get reminders. Infant vaccinations would be based on the World Health Organization schedule.”

Coming back to Harvard, Annie enlisted the help of fellow student Brandon Liu, a freshman computer science major, who has been handling the development, not only for the front end, but also for a sophisticated back end that manages the system at the health centers.

Helping out TTHV is Microsoft senior academic developer evangelist for New England Edwin Guarin, who has offered up Microsoft resources and made connections for the team. According to Anne, Guarin put them in touch with the fourth member of the team, Dave Amenta, a senior computer science major at Central Connecticut State University. Amenta has been helping write a Windows Phone 7-based front end for another aspect of the entire TTHV software package – a way for health-care workers in the villages to update schedules and data right through the phone to the back end back in the health-care center.

The Imagine Cup is an international innovation competition launched 10 years ago by Microsoft that pits teams of student inventors from around the globe against each other. The teams compete on addressing eight issues identified in the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals, such as combating AIDS and other diseases or encouraging environmental sustainability.

In 2009, LifeCode, a team led by then-MIT student Ryan Flynn, went to the national finals but didn’t take one of the top spots that would have sent it on to the world finals.  If they win this year’s nationals, TTHV would get a shot at the world finals to be held in July in New York City. And while there is some prize money involved, that isn’t the best feature of being a finalist, team member Liu said.

“One of the really great things that we are going to leverage at the finals is having access to a community of students and professional that are focused on this kind of work,” he said. “I think it would be very valuable to get feedback from people who have worked in this kind of venture in the past.”

This year there is also a People’s Choice award category in the Imagine Cup, in which anyone from the public at large can vote for their favorite team or idea. That can be done through Facebook, at http://on.fb.me/hdJpYB.