Making a better flip-flop to overcome illiteracy and disease

[undeterred]

Dec. 13, 2013



In many parts of the world, a good share of the population wears flip-flops. In America, the candy-colored sandals are a ubiquitous herald of summer. In rural Uganda, kids wear them, adult men and moms wear them whether they're bopping around the compound, working in the fields or getting water.

For Professor Tony Goldberg and postdoctoral scholar Sarah Paige at UW-Madison, flip-flops present a challenge and an opportunity to overcome illiteracy and better combat helminths, the parasitic worms that can burrow into bare feet and cause gastrointestinal illness. Thanks to a recent $100,000 Grand Challenges Exploration grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, they're developing the holoflop™ that protects feet from soil-borne parasites and encourages people to wear them. The holoflop is a flip-flop with a hologram attached that will show the benefits of wearing sandals to people who cannot read, says Goldberg, associate director for research at UW-Madison's Global Health Institute (GHI), professor of epidemiology in the School of Veterinary Medicine, and director of the Kibale EcoHealth Project. Paige, a medical geographer, works with Goldberg at the university and has been part of the Kibale project since its inception.

Illiteracy is a substantial road block worldwide as public health practitioners try to disseminate information about everything from medication to child vaccinations. With holoflops, Paige and Goldberg will tap into people's knowledge of symbols, graphics, pictures and images to deliver the health message. "We are being educated by local people on symbolism that will be relevant to them," Paige says.

"Grand Challenges Explorations is designed to foster the most innovative ideas to save the lives of the world's poorest people," says Chris Wilson, director of the Gates Foundation's Discovery and Translational Sciences team. Paige and Goldberg's project, "Flip-Flops and Holograms for Disrupting Helminth Transmission," was among 81 projects selected for initial Gates Foundation funding from more than 2,700 proposals. The projects address a wide range of issues including using social data for social good, designing the next generation of condom, helping women farmers in the developing world, finding new interventions for neglected diseases, and bringing together human and animal health for new solutions.

http://www.news.wisc.edu/22397

Awesome!

[knitter4democracy]

1. Why a hologram telling you to wear what you're wearing?

I would think that there would be better ways to educate people on why they should wear shoes (and really, is that people don't want to more than it is an issue of money and access?) than to show some annoying hologram every time they put on the shoes they bought and know they want to and should wear.

[Warpy]

2. More likely, one in a market stall to attract your eye

and then convince you that the shoes are really worth wearing, especially for the kids.

I like that they're using focus groups, villagers, I hope, to help develop images that will actually work. I know the traditional top-down designs over the years have been the cause of both merriment and disgust.

[knitter4democracy]

3. That's what I thought until I read the article.

The article says they'd be on the shoes themselves. Weird.

Yeah, we first-worlders are always so good at knowing how to communicate with third-worlders.

[Warpy]

4. Lending through Kiva

has given me a glimpse of what those market stalls look like and the hologram on the shoe would be eye catching enough that people would pick those shoes up to look at them and learn the lesson about protecting their feet.

That's rather the point.

[eppur_se_muova]

5. I thought this had something to do with multivibrators ... nt

[loudsue]

6. Wow! Let's develop some of those to show right wingers how to THINK! Let them see the evils

of faux news, and how rich people can be dangerous parasites, too!