Date: 2025-05-01 Page is: DBtxt003.php txt00010799
Technology
MIT
MIT D-Lab ... D Lab Mobile Technology
Burgess COMMENTARY
Peter Burgess
Peter Burgess
Amy Smith
Founder, Co-Director ... Inventor, visionary and inspirational teacher, Amy is the founder of D-Lab, and has a contagious passion for creativity and innovation. The daughter of an MIT professor, Amy started coming to MIT very early as a kid, and decided to stay for her undergraduate and graduate studies. She joined the Peace Corps for four years in Botswana, where she taught middle school in the Kalahari Desert and then became the Regional Beekeeping Officer for the Okavango River Delta. Amy has also founded or co-founded IDDS, IDEAS Competition, IDI and Rethink Relief. In her 'free' time, Amy pursues a variety of crafts, plays the saxophone, guitar and tin whistle and enjoys cycling, and kayaking.
Contact: mmadinot@mit.edu
Amy's Videos
February 2006 May 2013
Recent Posts by Amy D-Lab's D-ecitennial (It's our 10th anniversary!) Posted Nov 23, 2011 Design Mini-Project: Low-Cost Rainwater Harvesting Posted Feb 18, 2010 Amy in the News Closing the Digital Divide: How one Pakistani woman is tackling poverty with technology Dec 4, 2015 - Acumen Why Malta needs futurists Oct 8, 2015 - Times of Malta D-Lab's Amy Smith to deliver Dana M. Dourdeville Lecture on Engineering in Service to Society Sep 23, 2015 - Brown School of Engineering Botswana: D'Kar Hosts IDDS Summit Aug 6, 2015 - Daily Botswana News D-Lab's Amy Smith joins Bill Gates on a panel addressing innovation Oct 10, 2014 - MIT News
Research D-Lab Research Groups and Resources
D-Lab’s research program including needs assessment, product evaluations, and sector-specific applied research. Undergraduates, graduate students, post-docs and research staff are all engaged in the D-Lab research program. In addition to our research groups and areas, D-Lab offers resources such as research guides and frameworks.
D-Lab Research Groups
BIOMASS FUEL & COOKSTOVES GROUP The D-Lab biomass fuel and cookstove team has developed innovative methods for testing and evaluating biomass fuels and cooking technology in the lab and in the field, as well as a range of approaches to measuring performance and impact. The team works closely with producers of alternative fuels in Africa, the Caribbean, and Central America, to seek lasting solutions to the environmental, health, and security dangers resulting from the use of wood and wood charcoal.
MOBILE TECHNOLOGY GROUP The Mobile Technology Lab, established in 2014 by Rich Fletcher and based at D-Lab, develops new mobile technologies for a wide range of applications that have social impact, including: mHealth, global health, mobile psychiatry, and intelligent agriculture. Their research spans the areas of electronics / sensor design, advanced signal processing algorithms, machine learning, and user interface design.
OFF-GRID ENERGY GROUP Electricity access is a critical enabler of development, and is essential for providing clean water and sanitation, increasing productivity, promoting economic development, improving health, reducing poverty, and environmental protection. The D-Lab off-grid energy team works to identify technologies and products that can provide benefits to off-grid rural communities, and to catalyze market based solutions to increase access to these technologies.
LOCAL INNOVATION & DEVELOPMENT GROUP (INTERNATIONAL DEVELOPMENT INNOVATION NETWORK) IDIN’s research program explores the role of local innovation and grassroots problem solving in improving community wellbeing and addressing development challenges associated with poverty. Their research is organized into three areas: 1) local innovation processes and ecosystems: 2) development impacts of local innovation; and 3) enabling and scaling local innovation.
COMPREHENSIVE INITIATIVE ON TECHNOLOGY EVALUATION The Comprehensive Initiative on Technology Evaluation (CITE) is the first-ever program dedicated to developing methods for product evaluation in global development. CITE is led by an interdisciplinary team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and draws upon diverse expertise to evaluate products.
Research Resources from D-Lab
LEAN RESEARCH Lean Research is a framework and emerging approach to field research in the contexts of development work that seeks to maximize benefit and minimize burden and waste for all stakeholders in the research process. The Lean Research community includes over 100 researchers, practitioners, donors, and policymakers working in the international development and humanitarian fields.
USER RESEARCH FRAMEWORK D-Lab Scale-Ups' User Research Framework provides in-depth guidance on how to create a qualitative research plan and approach cross-cultural interviews, observation, and immersion activities as well as D-Lab's co-design method.
Gmail Peter Burgess
christopher macrae
Reply-To: christopher macrae
To: John Kiehl
Two years addressing human needs with mobile phones at D-Lab
As mobile phones have become an increasingly important part of people’s lives in developing countries, I launched the Mobile Technology Group nearly two years ago at D-Lab to help apply this technology to address important human needs, such as health, agriculture, and education.
In many ways, our Mobile Technology Group is a synthesis of my experience and training at the MIT Media Lab, with whom I still collaborate, and where I had the opportunity to spend 20-plus years working with three amazing mentors: Neil Gershenfeld (Physics and Electronics, FabLabs), Hiroshi Ishii (Human-Computer Interface Design), and Roz Picard (Physiological Monitoring and Machine Learning).
At D-Lab, I am able to apply these interdisciplinary skills to tackle some of the world’s most challenging problems with meaningful impact on people’s lives.
Global health, medicine, agriculture, environmental monitoring, and education
Approximately 60 percent of our group’s work is focused on global health, with other projects in medicine, agriculture, environmental monitoring, and education. Our research projects range from mobile apps and devices to assess newborn babies in India, to low-cost tool kits for diagnosing pulmonary diseases and cardiovascular disease, which are a substantial burden throughout the world. For this work, we’ve been fortunate to receive a variety of research grants and awards from many organizations, including USAID, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the MIT Tata Center for Technology and Design, the MIT-MISTI program, and the Vodafone Americas Foundation.
Much of what our group does is build clever little devices that connect to a mobile phone to perform specific tasks—such as measuring the amount of particles in the air or scanning a person’s skin to detect early signs of diabetes. Since Bluetooth adds additional cost, and requires the need for people to remember to recharge the batteries, we have developed a common USB interface for Android phones, so the external devices are powered by the phone itself without any need for batteries.
Some of the mobile apps we develop don’t need any external devices at all, because smart phones already contain many integrated sensors, including high resolution cameras. Using advanced signal processing techniques and machine learning algorithms, we can transform a smart phone into a portable lab, to diagnose disease or test dairy milk, for example. Since no hardware is required, these technologies can be deployed and scaled very quickly once the clinical and scientific validation is completed.
Interface design: pioneering the use of augmented reality
Of all the things we do, interface design is probably most important, although it’s probably the least appreciated. Many engineering schools around the world have designed mobile apps and electronic gadgets to be used in low-resource areas, but most of these have failed—not because the technology did not work, but because it did not match the skills and resource constraints of the users.
As an example, one area of interface design our group has been pioneering is the use of augmented reality for application to health screening, medical devices, and printed diagnostic tests. When I was working in the US Air Force 20 years ago, we were using augmented reality to help people to do maintenance on very complex machines, such as aircraft engines using fancy glasses. In our group, we are now applying this technology to enable unskilled health workers to essentially do maintenance on people, and to interpret complex biochemical tests that are emerging in the field of point of care diagnostics.
Shifting the focus from apps and gadgets to the ways in which mobile technology can influence behavior
The next wave of technology innovation, however, is not about apps and gadgets, but rather thinking about how mobile technology influences people’s behavior. As an assistant professor at UMass Medical School Department of Psychology, I also study how mobile technologies can play an important role in mental health and behavioral interventions. As the world’s population ages, an increasing proportion of our disease burden is not infectious diseases, but rather chronic diseases, such as diabetes and cancer. Improving our lifestyle and nutrition is an important part of that.
As a culture, we increasingly rely on mobile phones to communicate with the rest of the world and to spread ideas. These little devices that we hold in our hands are actually very powerful platforms to deliver images, audio, and video, as well as to connect us to a wide variety of social media and a select network of humans. In collaboration with other clinical researchers, we are exploring topics which are perhaps less palatable but equally important, including: depression, substance abuse, post-traumatic stress disorder, suicide, and the process of radicalization. Research in these areas is complex, but includes tools such as passive screening of affect and psychopathology, tools for meditation, and navigating social support networks. This is our next frontier.
Certainly, mobile phones are used by communities in both developed and developing countries. However, in developing countries, there are few technology alternatives. Whether it is for scanning a newborn child or screening for Alzheimer’s in an elderly woman, the mobile phone is a versatile tool that is both personal and ubiquitous. At D-Lab, I hope to continue to explore these different research paths.
On a personal note: why D-Lab
As a child of immigrant parents, and the first person in my immediate family to go to college, I’m happy to have the opportunity at D-Lab to work with poor communities around the world. My step-father was a carpenter, so I grew up with power tools, learning to build houses and fix cars. The environment at D-Lab seems quite familiar and very real, with everyone here knowing how to use tools to build things, like bicycles or cooking stoves, with natural materials, like metal, wood and stone.
At the D-Lab 10th anniversary celebration a few years ago, I was impressed that invited guests were instructed to screen print their own T-shirts once they arrived. I think this grounding is a refreshing balance to many of the technologies we develop at MIT, which are often virtual or synthetic. The D-Lab perspective and its focus on the local community needs serve as important guiding principles for any successful technology deployment, and certainly mobile technology is no exception.
To learn more about our projects and team, visit the Mobile Technology Group website!