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Five-year, $1.1 million grant to develop and test mobile app in partnership with Brazilian researchers
ATLANTA — An international team of researchers co-led by Professor Christine Stauber in the Georgia State University School of Public Health is empowering residents of low-income communities to improve sanitation in their neighborhoods through an innovative mobile app.
Funded by a five-year grant of up to $1.1 million from the Fogarty International Center of the National Institutes of Health, the team will work directly with residents of an informal community on the periphery of Salvador, Brazil, to develop culturally relevant messaging and features for the app. Over the course of the study, the researchers will test whether the app effectively encourages households to connect to the sewer system and report sanitation and maintenance issues.
“The lessons we learn from the development and testing of this app can help improve health and quality of life for the residents of Salvador,” Stauber said. “They also have the potential to be applied to resource-limited communities around the world, including here in the United States.”
The project builds on years of collaboration with researchers in Brazil who study disease transmission in densely populated, informally built urban areas that often lack adequate infrastructure. More than 10% of Brazil’s population live in these communities, which are often referred to as favelas, and poor sanitation can expose residents to bacterial illness such as leptospirosis and mosquito-borne illnesses such as dengue, Zika and chikungunya.
The app, known as +Mais-Lugar (“place” in Portuguese), allows users to photograph and report sanitation issues such as open sewers and broken infrastructure with their smartphone or other mobile device. The images will be classified with the help of artificial intelligence, and the team will work with local water and sanitation service providers to integrate data collected from the app into their operations and maintenance systems.
“The widespread adoption of mobile phones creates opportunities for cost-effective and scalable solutions to sanitation challenges,” said co-principal investigator Federico Costa, an associate professor at the Institute of Collective Health at the Federal University of Bahia and researcher at Fiocruz. “By designing apps in collaboration with community members, we can help ensure that they meet their specific needs.”
Preliminary feedback from users has led to the addition of features such as voice recording capabilities and WhatsApp integration. After finding that traditional reporting systems may reduce participation from people not connected to the existing sewer system, the researchers added the option of anonymous reporting.
“Mobile health technologies such as these have the potential to give people who otherwise might not have a seat at the table the opportunity to shape decisions about sanitation infrastructure,” Stauber said.
Stauber leads a popular School of Public Health study abroad in Brazil and collaborates frequently with local researchers on projects related to water, sanitation and hygiene. In a recently published study in the journal PLoS Water, she and Costa highlight the potential for wastewater monitoring of human mitochondrial DNA to be used as an early warning system for detecting inflammation from infectious diseases that are prevalent in resource-limited tropical and subtropical regions.
In addition to Stauber and Costa, investigators on the project include:
- Anu Bourgeois, professor in the Department of Computer Science at GSU
- Joe Brown, professor and interim director of the Water Institute at the Gillings School of Global Public Health at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
- Mitermayer Reis, senior researcher at the Instituto Gonçalo Moniz
- Claire Spears, professor in the School of Public Health at GSU
- Cassandra White, associate professor of anthropology at GSU
— Story by Sam Fahmy
Research reported in this news release was supported by the Fogarty International Center of the National Institutes of Health under award number 4R33TW012610-03. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.