Global Alliance for Medical Innovation
An incubator for innovative solutions to pressing global health challenges.
The mission of GAMI is to develop and implement accessible and socially impactful medical technologies for low resourced healthcare settings globally. We collaborate directly with organizations and clinicians on the ground in limited resource communities around the world to create innovative solutions to pressing global health challenges. Our products are developed through the process of human-centered design, ensuring maximum impact for the end users and communities.
Ongoing Projects
Homecare Delivery
India
Nurses in urban healthcare settings in India face grueling working conditions, causing substantial burnout and attrition rates. Meanwhile, India’s aging population and unique healthcare infrastructure have led to increasing demand for daily care for immediate and long term needs. Home-centered healthcare delivery is an appealing option to address these needs, but is currently underdeveloped and inaccessible. Working with nursing centers and technology developers in Chennai, India, our team is designing a platform to connect patients with trained, local home care nurses.
Neurodegenerative Disease Diagnosis
India
Parkinson’s Disease (PD) is one of the most prevalent neurodegenerative diseases worldwide, but current diagnostics are often inaccessible and highly qualitative. The scarcity of healthcare providers in many resource-limited settings leads to the need for improved diagnostics available at minimal cost. Our team is developing a tablet-based diagnostic software to diagnose PD from patient drawing data to help guide care in low-resourced settings in India.
Low-Cost Stethoscope
India
Phonocardiography (listening to heart sounds) is a mainstay of the cardiac physical exam but assessing heart sounds using a traditional stethoscope requires extensive training and is inaccessible to a large portion of patients in low-resource settings. This team is designing a low-cost stethoscope, either for manual off-site classification by trained medical staff or autonomous detection by a native machine learning algorithm.
Fracture Diagnosis and Treatment
East Africa
Primary medical providers in many resource-limited health settings lack sufficient expertise to diagnose and treat fractures from X-ray images. As such, many patients with potentially life-threatening trauma conditions are not properly recognized and managed with the correct medical decisions: referred to secondary hospitals, stabilized surgically at the current hospital site, treated non-operatively, etc. Our team is designing a machine learning algorithm to diagnose pelvic and acetabular fractures from local imaging data and suggest treatment options to primary healthcare providers.
Pregnancy Education
Kenya
Women going through pregnancy are faced with limited access to medical support and attention, despite enduring one of the most physically and socially challenging part of their lives. Collaborating with maternal health clinics in Kenya, our team is designing a WhatsApp-based chatbot to provide basic guidance and support for patients throughout pregnancy.
Let's Build!
Interested in partnering with GAMI? Submit your project proposals and ideas below and we will be in touch!
Past Projects
Eye Health Screening with Corneal Surface Imaging
Infection and trauma of the ocular surface represent some of the largest contributors to preventable blindness globally, and can be eliminated through early detection and intervention. However, eye screening is expensive and inaccessible in low-resource regions due to a lack of doctors and equipment. Our team has developed an award-winning smartphone imaging system that uses machine learning to screen for corneal damage, and we worked with multiple hospitals and nonprofit organizations to validate our technology.
Cardiovascular Risk Screening with Corneal Arcus
Heart disease is the leading cause of mortality in the world, but screening efforts fall short in low-resource regions globally, due to inaccessibility of blood lipid testing. We worked with multiple hospitals in India to capture smartphone images of eyes, which contain a biomarker for cardiovascular disease known as corneal arcus, and built an application to predict heart disease risk using machine learning.
Specular Imaging of the Corneal Endothelium
Specular and confocal microscopes are important tools to monitor the health of the corneal endothelium, but their high costs limit accessibility in low-resource environments. We developed a low-cost, fully automated method to quantitatively evaluate the corneal endothelium using a smartphone adapter for a slit lamp microscope. Our technology has been validated in India and we conducted a trial at Massachusetts Eye and Ear Institute.
Mobile Application for Digitizing Health Records
Many rural communities around the world depend on community health organizations for medical care. These organizations have traditionally relied on paper-based medical records, which are difficult to transport and prone to loss, which adversely affects the quality and continuity of care. We developed a smartphone/tablet application for secure medical records storage with automatic cloud backup, and worked with a nonprofit organization in Sierra Leone to deploy this platform.
Postnatal Maternal Healthcare Message System
High maternal mortality rates in Haiti have resulted from limited accessibility to hospitals, medical personnel, and maternal health related information. To improve postpartum outcomes, our team developed an automated SMS messaging system to disseminate critical information regarding postpartum maternal health.
Deep Learning for Cancer Cell Segmentation
Working alongside collaborators at UMass Lowell and Massachusetts General Hospital, our team aimed to develop novel machine learning models in order to automate cell segmentation of cancerous vs. non-cancerous thyroid and breast cancer cells.
Smartphone-Based Diagnosis of Anemia
Anemia affects nearly a quarter of the world’s population. Yet, accurate diagnosis of it requires an invasive and painstaking procedure. We attempted to develop a smartphone-based method that allows physicians to measure hemoglobin concentration by imaging patients’ nail beds.
Timeline
Jun 1- Sep 3
Advisors share problem statements with GAMI board members
By Sep 3
Outreach Team and project advisors finalize problem statements and narrow scope
By Sep 22
GAMI technical teams are selected for projects
By Nov 3
Technical teams perform detailed needs assessment and research with the oversight of advisors
Dec 21 - Jan 26
Winter Break
By Jan 27
Teams regroup and resume work
Basic product output (Minimum viable product, prototype, etc)
By May 15
Who We Are
GAMI is made up of students from Harvard College, Harvard graduate schools, and other local universities who specialize in software engineering, machine learning, mechanical engineering, data science, and global health. We strive to incorporate the values of human-centered design, accessibility, and cultural awareness into our rigorous engineering process.
We work in teams of 4-5 student engineers, led by 1-2 team leads who manage the team, provide technical support, and interface regularly with our project advisors. We collaborate primarily with healthcare organizations on the ground across the world, as well as Harvard faculty and physicians.
Meet Board
-
Vishnu Emani
Co-President
I'm a Junior at Harvard, studying Biomedical Engineering, with a particular interest in developing innovative solutions to address critical gaps in global healthcare. I enjoy designing, building, and coding, but also thinking big picture about how to improve the lives of communities and individuals.
-
Richard Zhu
Co-President
Hi everyone! I'm Richard, a rising junior at Harvard College studying statistics, neuroscience, and computer science. It is an honor to serve as one of the GAMI co-presidents, and I look forward to building impactful global health technology projects with all of you!
-
Alina Yu
Co-Vice President
Hi! I'm Alina and I'm a senior studying computer science and global health at Harvard College. I'm passionate about technology, healthcare, and innovation!
-
Aneesh Mazumder
Co-Vice President
My name is Aneesh and I am a sophomore at Harvard studying Neuroscience and Government. I am interested in neurodegeneration from both a research and clinical perspective, so I plan to pursue an MD degree and use my research findings to help my patients and improve their quality of life as a physician.
-
Robin Pan
Co-Director of Events
Robin is a junior at Harvard College concentrating in Applied Mathematics with a secondary in Molecular and Cellular Biology. She's passionate about the intersection of tech and biology and is excited to help coordinate events and engagement this year!
-
Kimtee Kundu
Co-Director of Events
-
Fhasal Alam
Director of Finance
Hi, I am Fhasal, a rising sophomore at Harvard studying Chemistry. I'm interested in pediatric medicine and, in my free time, like to go for runs by the Charles!
-
Mariya Meleganich
Co-Director of Advisor Relations
Mariya is a junior in Mather House studying chemistry and data science. She is interested in developing new and innovative solutions to long-standing medical issues and hopes to create devices and medical technologies that can make a significant impact. In her free time, she enjoys figure skating, exploring cities, reading, and baking!
-
David An
Co-Director of Advisor Relations
I am a sophomore in Eliot studying Human Developmental and Regenerative Biology with a Secondary in Global Health and Health Policy. I currently do research at the Brigham and Women's Hospital on biomechanical control of endothelial cell size, and I hope to become a neurosurgeon in the future.
-
Aditya Tummala
Co-Director of Advisor Relations
Aditya Tummala is an undergraduate student at Harvard College from Brookings, SD studying Biomedical Engineering and is a Co-Director of Advisor Relations. He is passionate about multi-disciplinary approaches to innovation in the medical field and is excited to bring this philosophy to GAMI.
-
TingTing Yan
Board Member At-Large
My name is TingTing Yan and I’m a junior in Mather House studying Human Developmental & Regenerative Biology and Computer Science. In my free time, I enjoy playing Teamfight Tactics, poker, and catch up on Grey’s Anatomy (there’s so many seasons ;D).
-
Nora Sun
Board Member At-Large
I am a sophomore in Quincy House concentrating in Statistics. I am deeply passionate about the development of accessible, evidence-based digital interventions for psychiatric and neurological disorders.
-
Prof. Shriya Srinivasan
Advisor
Shriya Srinivasan is an assistant professor at the John A. Paulson Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. She is the founder and director of the Biohybrid Organs and Neuroprosthetics (BIONIC) Lab where engineers, neuroscientists, roboticists, surgeons, and rehabilitation experts solve challenges in neural control and rehabilitation.
-
Janani Ramesh
Advisor
Contact Us
Please reach out at harvardgami.board@gmail.com or fill out the following form to contact the GAMI team with your comments and concerns. Please include your full name and address to receive a written response.