What Happened?
Homebrew Sensing Project from Public Laboratory was named one of seven recipients of the Knight Foundation’s News Challenge focused on leveraging the power of health data. The project offers affordable chemical analysis tools that help residents locate and remove hazardous chemicals that can negatively impact community health.
The Goal
The Knight Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the California HealthCare Foundation, the Clinton Foundation and the Health Data Consortium launched the News Challenge in August. The goal of the program was to challenge health and technology innovators to harness the potential of health data to improve and protect the well-being of communities.
The collaboration of foundations divided $2.2 million between the seven winners to jumpstart their groundbreaking programs across the country. The winners developed projects that addressed specific health concerns in communities, generated civic participation in the problem-solving process and offered solution-building tools for sustainable improvements. With health data becoming more easily accessible and applicable to local leaders, the challenge aimed to take advantage of the information available to communities to enable more impactful solutions to dangerous health concerns.
Homebrew Success!
One of the seven winners of the Knight Foundation’s award was the Public Laboratory’s Homebrew Sensing Project that created free software tools able to measure a community’s health data including air and water quality. Community leaders can use the sensing solutions to gauge what and how much dangerous chemicals surround residents and make wise decisions on how best to eradicate the threats.
The affordable tools can be plugged into smartphones and laptops so users can measure the effects of hazardous chemicals outside of a laboratory. The project raised $110,000 in 2012 to develop the do-it-yourself spectrometry tools that measured petroleum in sediments and emissions from oil refineries in Louisiana. With the money from the Knight Foundation award, Public Laboratory plans to expand its product line and address community health concerns across the country.
Health Data To The Rescue
The Knight Foundation is not alone in seeking out new innovations to leverage health data to combat hazards nationwide. At the federal level, the White House hosted the Second Annual White House Safety Datapalooza with the U.S. Department of Transportation and the Department of Agriculture. The event showcased innovations in the private, nonprofit and academic sectors that are harnessing government public data to build solutions enhancing public safety through sustainable technology and services. The safety-data efforts focused on improvements to transportation, food, occupational and consumer products, disaster preparedness and emergency response.
One participant at the event was the USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service that recently announced its Salmonella Action Plan that will introduce new standards, strategies and innovations to reduce the number of illnesses sourced back to FSIS-regulated products.
With Salmonella poisoning affecting 1 million Americans annually, the action plan is working to raise the bar on PSIS product standards to ensure consumers are safe from harm. With greater accessibility to FSIS data, the USDA hopes to identify sources of contamination and proactively eliminate all threats.
Data Makes The World Go Round
Gov1 has kept an eye on the latest data-driven projects at the local level, most of which are working to make information more accessible to residents as well as decision makers.