Call for Action!

For young babies, height weight and age information in aggregate can serve as excellent proxies for health. Malnutrition and defective growth of babies in the developing world (example: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/13/world/asia/13malnutrition.html?em) motivate the existence of a scale that is linked to a data-collection network, so one can measure infant heights and weights, and report these to a central server.

For another class (D-Lab II), I'm working with a team that is developing the client side of this application. That is, we are working on developing a scale and a communication mechanism so that height and weight data can be collected and then sent over the GSM network, in the form of either SMS or voice data. What I won't be working on in that class is the server-side aspects of this system: what can one do with such a scale? Can you make systems that automatically process height-weight-age data to make nutrition recommendations (in real time ideally)? Can you use the data in other ways, make informative visualizations, or provide it to researchers in health?

The project is a little bit off the CFA beaten path, in that the main focus wouldn't be working on developing the cell-phone technologies directly, but leverage those existing to do some interesting data distillation and use. Well, there is definitely room to think about how to do feedback given a certain system of incoming messages, and other things CFA-like as well.