Accessible health knowledge in low connectivity environments (UNI)

WHO: Grey-box is a social innovation startup that is working to bridge the digital gap and accessible educational content in remote areas where the internet and the electricity grid are unreliable. WHY: The current crisis in Ukraine is marked by an unpressed level of support to their population from the international community. The language barrier is too often slowing down the efforts to provide medical equipment in the field quickly. The confusion is exacerbated by variations in naming conventions and local brands for various drugs. HOW: The goal is to provide an accessible and easy-to-use (many health professionals on the ground are using WhatsApp) tool that can be used to translate medical terms and equipment between Ukrainian and various other languages.

A portable cyber coffee shop manager for rural internet (Project Cybercafe)

WHO : Grey-box is social innovation startup that is working on providing free wifi access to educational content in areas where internet and electricity access is problematic. WHY : 50% of the world lives offline – they have not connected to the internet in the last 3 months. In Africa, the average cost for 1GB of data is 7% of the average monthly salary. Even in North America, 50% of rural Canada does not have access to the minimum speed for the internet. We believe that this is a solvable problem. HOW : In a nutshell, the current project (codenamed: CyberCoffee) aims at providing low-cost Android devices like UNI (https://www.grey-box.ca/uni/) with the ability to share their internet connection (usually through a 4G modem) with a group of users and manage everyone's access with more precision. The goal is to ensure that no individual user can slow down the access of the whole group by using too much bandwidth or monopolizing the available data.

Mesh Networking for Android Devices (Project Mesh)

WHO: Grey-box is social innovation startup that is working on providing free wifi access to educational content in areas where internet and electricity access is problematic. WHY: 50% of the world lives offline – they haven’t connected to the internet in the last 3 months. In Africa, the average cost for 1GB of data is 7% of the average monthly salary. Even in North America, 50% of rural Canada do not have access to the minimum speed for internet. We believe that this is a solvable problem. HOW: In a nutshell, the current project (codenamed : Mesh) aims at providing low-cost android devices like UNI (https://www.grey-box.ca/uni/) with mesh networking capabilities in order to be able to share storage, communications (IM) and increase their total network range. Grey-box is a nonprofit structured under the principle of mobile-first and remote-first. Diversity is not only encouraged, it is an integral part of the strength of the team and its projects

Open-source medical translation tool for international NGO field work (Project Codex)

WHO: Grey-box is a social innovation startup working to bridge the digital gap and accessible educational content in remote areas where the internet and the electricity grid are unreliable. WHY: Health crises caused by natural or human-made disasters are often met by support from the international community. Too often, the language barrier slows down the efforts to provide medical equipment quickly in the field. As such, variations in naming conventions and local drug brands exacerbate the confusion - as names for pharmaceuticals vary between countries, even if they speak the same language. HOW: The goal is to provide an accessible and easy-to-use tool (many health professionals on the ground are using WhatsApp) that can be used to translate medical terms and equipment between various languages.