Digital BirthStamp

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Inspiration

Three of the four members of our team have worked in healthcare. Specifically, Azra has worked at a hospital in Tanzania, where she witnessed first-hand how birth records were collected. Mostly paper-based, several births end up being stolen and/or undocumented in third-world countries such as Tanzania.

What it does

A blockchain platform for recording digital live birth records that serves as basic population information available for individuals to access, for governments to use for policy development and planning, for NGOs to plan and prioritize projects, and international aid agencies to prioritize projects and allocate funding.

How we built it

After carefully formulating how our project could be useful on the Blockchain, we created the idea for a simple, straight-forward mobile application called Digital BirthStamp, where a Healthcare Worker can permanently record the name, date of birth, guardian(s), city of birth, and gender of the baby (so essentially a digital birth certificate) to a ledger on the Blockchain. The legal guardian(s) and eventually the individual who was born can view the record as well, through a secure login using fingerprint authentication thanks to ShoCard™, and government officials can also view all of the past transactions/birth records from the whole year.

Challenges we ran into

One challenge was how do we get around corruption and misuse by users, keeping the system honest and ensuring the integrity of the system, which forced us to incorporate a biometric authentication solution.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

At the core of it, we are proud to being one step closer to solving a systemic issue. Being able to formulate a prototype for a user friendly app that could potentially document millions of more babies born in developing countries is something we believe has a future and can make a real difference in the world.

What we learned

We learned that there's a huge gap in the existing Blockchain community on self-sovereign identities, as we did not find any companies directly related to identity, specifically recording birth records. Birth is where your identity begins, and we want to emphasize that using blockchain technology can significantly fill this gap. Additionally, although we did minimal coding for the project, working on this project forced us to think critically about how our app would be useful on the blockchain.

What's next for Digital BirthStamp

We would like to incorporate the app in more developing countries, especially in Sub-Saharan Africa where the issue is the greatest in those countries. We would like to add more functionalities to the app, and also add more data points and the biometrics aspect of the application. Check out our prototype built using Photoshop and Invision!