Creating Hope in Conflict: a Humanitarian Grand Challenge, a partnership of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), the U.K. Department for International Development (DFID), the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Netherlands, with support from Grand Challenges Canada, recognizes solutions which will improve humanitarian provision for the hardest to reach people affected by conflict. The program awards grants of up to $250,000 CAD for Seed innovations and up to $1,000,000 CAD for Transition to Scale innovations. On August 18th, the Humanitarian Grand Challenge announced that Body Surface Translations (the maker of AutoAnthro) was awarded a Seed grant. AutoAnthro is a digital anthropometry tool which uses 3D scanning to quickly and securely gather child nutritional information such as height, head circumference, and mid-upper arm circumference.

With support from the Humanitarian Grand Challenge, Body Surface Translations is working with partners--International Medical Corps and Dalberg Design-- to adapt AutoAnthro for use in complex humanitarian crises through rigorous field testing and extensive design iteration. Field trials will take place in South Sudan.

The 27 Humanitarian Grand Challenge finalists emerged out of a pool of 648 applications from 80 countries and will implement solutions for conflict-affected communities around the world.

Dr. Gene Alexander, CTO at Body Surface Translations, said, “We’re honored to receive this award. It will allow us to adapt AutoAnthro for use in some of the most challenging contexts in the world--complex humanitarian crises. We believe a less invasive method for capturing child nutritional measurements is particularly critical in the current global context and we look forward to accelerating progress with this support.”

For more information on AutoAnthro or this project, please visit bodysurfacetranslations.com or email info@bodysurfacetranslations.com

This weekend, AutoAnthro will be at ASN Nutrition 2019 in Baltimore. This conference will convene some of the world’s top nutrition researchers. AutoAnthro’s team will be there. We’re excited to hear from leaders in Global Nutrition, Maternal and Child Nutrition, and others. If you will be there and would like a demo of AutoAnthro, please click below to contact us. See you soon!

Last week, Body Surface Translations participated in the International Symposium on Understanding the Double Burden of Malnutrition which was hosted in Vienna by the IAEA, WHO, and UNICEF. Over 500 people from more than 120 countries attended the symposium.

As one of the 4 invited exhibitors, our team demonstrated the AutoAnthro technology for a wide variety of UN representatives, policy makers, researchers, health professionals, and NGOs interested in finding better ways of conducting anthropometric measurements of children.

Thank you to everyone who stopped at the booth and participated in the “Learning Labs”. Please subscribe to receive periodic updates whenever we have journal articles or major product developments.

AnnychkaMelenchuk [CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], from Wikimedia Commons

The IAEA is hosting the International Symposium on Understanding the Double Burden of Malnutrition for Effective Interventions. Body Surface Translations is excited to participate as an exhibitor and as host of three Learning Labs.

Many of our partners and collaborators will be represented in Vienna this week. We are excited to spend time with like-minded individuals and organizations who are combating malnutrition.

Here is a livestream of the symposium. Follow us on Twitter and follow the conversation using #dbmal.

The Learning Labs are held Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday from 13:30 to 14:00 in room M100. Please stop at our booth to sign up.

Hope to see you there!

AutoAnthro, a technology developed by Body Surface Translations, was spotlighted this week by Hypepotamus magazine.

The article provides a summary of BST’s history and how AutoAnthro fits into the global fight against malnutrition.

Check out the full article here.

One of Body Surface Translation’s earliest partners is the Georgia Research Alliance (GRA). Check out this recent update about BST to find out more about what where we’ve been and where we’re going.

In an article published today in PLOS ONE, researchers found BST’s AutoAnthro technology to be

“reliable, low-cost, portable, and can handle movement; making it ideal for use in routine nutritional assessment.”

Click here for the full text of the article.

This week at the GeekWire Summit, Sue Desmond-Hellmann (CEO of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation), discussed AutoAnthro’s 3D body scanning technology.

Desmond-Hellmann highlighted AutoAnthro as an example of innovative technology being used in the fight against stunting and malnutrition.

Follow this link to jump to the AutoAnthro portion of the interview.

September 26, 2018                                                              

Contact:  Gene Alexander

Email: info@bodysurfacetranslations.com

Breakthrough Technology Enables Digital Scanning for Child Nutritional Status

NEW YORK, NY Sep 2018- AutoAnthro, a product of Body Surface Translations (BST), was showcased at the second annual Goalkeepers Event in New York City today. This new technology will enable public health workers around the globe to accurately and easily capture children’s height/length and head and arm circumference, which are key inputs to monitoring growth and understanding malnutrition and even intervening to prevent stunting. 

AutoAnthro is a cloud-based hardware and software system which performs a 3-D scan of a child in a matter of moments.   It  is both easy to use and accurate and enables the user to automatically capture data, aggregate it, and analyze it. Traditional anthropometry, the science of measuring human proportions, involves using a tape measure and positioning a child flat on a board while extending their legs, a process that is cumbersome and can upset the child and parent.

“We’re excited to assist in attaining the Goalkeepers objective of good health and well-being for children worldwide” says Gene Alexander, Chief Technology Officer of BST.  “We believe 3D imaging systems can make the difficult job of health workers easier.  Long-term, we think this will become the standard of care globally and as more and more data is captured, it will allow public health officials to find hotspots of undernutrition and evaluate appropriate interventions more effectively.”

Around the world, roughly one in four children under five has low height for age, a condition known as stunting, which causes developmental impairment that can negatively affect both physical well-being and intellectual capacity.

BST received a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in 2014 to adapt a pre-existing technology for young children and test it in partnership with Emory University. At the conclusion of that successful development and controlled trial, the Foundation funded an independent field study of the technology with the US Centers for Disease Control in Guatemala and Kenya.  Those trials are currently in process, with the Guatemala study work using AutoAnthro described at Goalkeepers 2018.   

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 BST is a for-profit company based in Athens, Georgia, USA. A demonstration of a very early version of the device is available here. For more information please visit www.bodysurfacetranslations.com.

In a journal article published in Maternal & Child Nutrition on September 8, 2018, the authors compared AutoAnthro to traditional anthropometry. They observed that “crying was more common during manual measurement, and anthropometrist interviews confirmed that 3D imaging was less stressful for children than manual measurement.” 

In November 2017, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation awarded a grant to the CDC Foundation to “evaluate the suitability of a new imaging technology, the AutoAnthro system from Body Surface Translations, Inc., for assessing recumbent length and height among children ages six to 59 months in a minimum of two national surveillance/survey settings.” 

Details of the grant can be found here.

In Sight and Life Magazine’s latest publication, authors David Boyle, Katharine Kreis and Laura Anderson from PATH, mentioned AutoAnthro as one of the “innovative products promis[ing] to dramatically improve field-based measurement of nutritional status, particularly in low-resource settings.”

Click here to read the full article.

Body Surface Translations, Inc. was mentioned in a recent peer-reviewed article in PLOS, entitled “Improving the quality of child anthropometry: Manual anthropometry in the Body Imaging for Nutritional Assessment Study (BINA)”.

Excerpt:

“[W]e conclude that [Body Imaging for Nutritional Assessment] can provide a valuable evaluation of 3D imaging for child anthropometry because there is comparison to gold-standard, manual measurements.”

Gene Alexander, CTO of Body Surface Translations, Inc., presented AutoAnthro at the 2017 Global Food Security Symposium in a special session on measuring improvements in diet quality.

Georgia Research Alliance (GRA) is one of BST’s earliest partners. They produced this video about our swine technology.

Hog farmers lose an estimated $200 million a year in penalties because they've miscalculated the weight of their swine. But Georgia-based Body Surface Translations (BST) has developed 3-D imaging technology that instantly determines how much a pig weighs --with extraordinary accuracy.