Marije Kamphuis, a Technical Medicine and Health Sciences student at the University of Twente, has won the Vodafone Mobiles for Good Challenge with her team. This contest is intended for social enterprises that aim to solve social problems with the aid of mobile technology. The team is using the prize money of 30,000 euros to develop an app that helps parents to provide appropriate treatment for their children with asthma.
In the Netherlands, about 300,000 children between the ages of four and twelve years receive medication for asthma. Many parents find it difficult to gauge when their child is short of breath or not. And because a doctor can only examine their condition at a particular moment in time, it is not always possible to provide an unequivocal answer. All this creates uncertrainty for the parents, but - even worse - it can also mean that a child receives too little or too much medication.
During her doctoral research for the Technical Medicine degree programme, Marije Kamphuis is studying asthma in children. Together with paediatrician, Boony Thio, she discovered that an application for mobile telephones, which can automatically recognize whether a child is short of breath or not, can offer a solution. With this idea she formed a team with which she participated in the Vodafone Mobiles for Good Challenge. After several rounds and workshops in the field of business models and pitch techniques, they were able to present the idea to a jury last Friday. A total of six teams, including the Kamphuis team, won prizes. Kamphuis says it is "great" that they won. "I still have a big smile on my face."
Puffer
The Kamphuis team receives a cash prize of 30,000 euros that it can spend on the development of the app, which has been given the name 'puffer'. In addition, the team, which besides Kamphuis consists of Boony Thio (paediatric pulmonologist), Jean Driessen (sports doctor), Bram Lorist (technology developer) and Joost Bakker (healthcare manager), wants to establish a social enterprise to launch the app on the market. Vodafone supports the winning teams in this respect with a boot camp that will provide intensive coaching during a period of four months.
