Gates Foundation

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Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Releases Open-Source Software to Support Efforts that Expand Access to Financial Services in Developing Countries

Press Release | Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation | October 16, 2017

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation today released a new open-source software for creating payment platforms that will help unbanked people around the world access digital financial services. The software is designed to provide a reference model for payment interoperability between banks and other providers across a country’s economy. It is available now, free-of-cost, for software developers to adapt and banks, financial service providers and companies to implement. Information on the code can be found at mojaloop.io...

Bill Gates Won’t Save You From The Next Ebola Outbreak

Robert Fortner and Alex Park | HuffPost | May 1, 2017

In late August 2014, Tom Frieden, then director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, traveled to West Africa to assess the raging Ebola crisis. In the five months before Frieden’s visit, Ebola had spread from a village in Guinea, across borders and into cities in Liberia and Sierra Leone. Médecins Sans Frontières, the first international responder on the scene, had run out of staff to treat the rising numbers of sick people and had deemed the outbreak “out of control” back in June...

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Four Things We Can Do Now to Unlock the Cure for Cancer

As a community we are capable of working together to achieve greater things. If we marshal our resources to work together, I believe we can unlock the cure for cancer. This is a rare opportunity. We need to change the models and shift our culture towards collaboration. We can’t just tweak around the edges — patients and their families can’t afford to wait. An alternative system, where all publicly-funded research and data are required to be shared would allow authors to unlock their content and data for re-use with a global audience, and co-operate towards new discoveries and analysis.

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Gates Foundation’s Strict Open Access Policy may have Domino Effect

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, a major supporter of health and development research, is to introduce an open access policy next month for the studies it funds that goes further than most other research funders. The policy “will enable other researchers to access the latest evidence and draw on it to advance their own research” to help tackle malnutrition, infectious diseases, and child and maternal mortality, writes Trevor Mundel, the foundation’s president of global health, on the organization's website.

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Hackathon to Focus on Open Source Biometric System for mHealth in Poor Countries

Press Release | Redgate Software, SimPrints | October 26, 2015

A team from Redgate Software, the Cambridge UK based company behind the world’s leading SQL Server and .NET development tools, is devoting a week to work on the code for an open source biometric fingerprint system that will improve the lives of the poor in the developing world. The system is used by SimPrints, a non profit tech company working with the Gates Foundation and charities like Médecins Sans Frontières to design a low cost biometric scanner that can be deployed in the field. With the scanner, a health worker can swipe a patient’s fingerprint to find and view the correct health records on a mobile device, either online or offline.

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Open-Source Thinking Is Revolutionizing Medical Device Development

Catherine Bolgar | 3D Perspectives | September 1, 2014

...As Moore’s Law brings down the cost of computing, and as consumer electronics become more sophisticated and yet cheaper, there are opportunities to use those advances to make medical devices that can serve the bottom of the pyramid...

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Smartphone, Finger Prick, 15 Minutes, Diagnosis—Done!

Press Release | Columbia University | February 4, 2015

A team of researchers, led by Samuel K. Sia, associate professor of biomedical engineering at Columbia Engineering, has developed a low-cost smartphone accessory that can perform a point-of-care test that simultaneously detects three infectious disease markers from a finger prick of blood in just 15 minutes. The device replicates, for the first time, all mechanical, optical, and electronic functions of a lab-based blood test. Specifically, it performs an enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) without requiring any stored energy: all necessary power is drawn from the smartphone...

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