HSOC Senior Sonya Davey and her team are finalists in the Dell Empowering Women Challenge Project for their entry, “Unsafe Ultrasound.” This project has also been selected as the 10 finalists in the PanIIT Business Plan Competition
The project:
“Preventing ultrasound sex-determination can significantly correct sex imbalance in developing nations.
Sex-selective abortion occurs at highest rates in China, Armenia, and India. Each year 750,000 female fetuses are selectively aborted in India. Societies with large gender imbalances are correlated with an increased violence against women, such as rape and slavery. The United Nations, many individual governments, and public health activists are actively searching for solutions to curb female feticide.
95% of pre-natal sex-detection occurs via the use of an ultrasound machine. Ultrasounds have served as enablers for families to act upon their desire to abort females.
Our mission is to curb female feticide. We have developed a novel ultrasound technology that automatically prevents the identification of genitalia in live images produced by ultrasound machines. We have developed a novel and IP-protected ultrasound software, which employs an algorithm to efficiently and accurately locate and hide the genitalia in live images produced by ultrasound machines. “