Here’s a mobile application, built, not to compete in the million dollar application market, but to change a million lives. SootSwap, is a mobile app made to promote clean cooking technologies in several places across the world, including rural India where use of traditional cookstoves has led to deaths due to inhalation of smoke from open cooking fires.
According to statistics provided from the Global Burden of Disease Study 2010, an estimate four million people die, annually due to smoke from open fires. A family living in rural India can earn enough money to buy better stoves by selling carbon credits to carbon market. But how does one verify the reduction in carbon emissions by clean cookstoves ?
Qualcomm Inc, Nexleaf Ananlytics, TERI (The Energy and Resource Institute ), Project Surya and the UK department of International Development, together, worked on building SootSwap, an application that will detect carbon data and help solve this problem.
How does SootSwap work? The SootSwap system has a mobile phone based temp sensing app that connects to an Android phone or Brew CDMA phone. Stove usage is calculated with this app. Data of number of times the stove is turned on is sent to a server, wirelessly. This data can be provided to carbon market investors as proof of reduction in carbon emission.
Investors can thereafter purchase credits and transfer money directly to families using clean stoves to cook food.
Photo credit : Qualcomm/TERI