When Olivia Koburongo had her grandmother, who was fatally ill with pneumonia, transferred from hospital to hospital in Kampala, Uganda before she got the proper diagnosis, she knew that she had to do something about it before she loses her beloved granny. For that, she used her expertise in engineering to develop a kit that automates the entire process of tracking the vitals and conditions of any patient with pneumonia.
Called the Mama-Ope, or Mother’s Hope, it is a kit that includes a biomedical smart jacket and a diagnostic mobile app. It was created by Koburongo and her fellow telecommunications engineering graduate Brian Turyabagye together with a team of doctors.
The kit is fairly easy to use. All the health workers have to do is slip the jacket onto the patient and the device will do its job of picking up sound patterns from the lungs, temperature and breathing rate through its sensors.
Turyabagye, who is 24, said that the processed information is sent to a mobile phone app via Bluetooth which analyzes the information in comparison to known data so as to get an estimate of the strength of the disease.
According to an independent study by its inventors, the prototype jacket can diagnose pneumonia up to three times faster than a doctor, while reducing human error.
“The problem we’re trying to solve is diagnosing pneumonia at an early stage before it gets severe,” said 26-year-old Koburongo.
“We’re also trying to solve the problem of not enough manpower in hospitals because currently we have a doctor to patient ratio which is one to 24,000 in the country,” she added.
The kit is now shortlisted for the 2017 Royal Academy of Engineering Africa Prize while patenting it is still on the works.
A few hospitals in Uganda have already used the kit. Turyabagye shared that they plan to expand its use in the country’s referral hospital and trickle them down to remote health centers, and furthermore in other countries where pneumonia is a difficult disease to conquer.
“Once you have this information captured on cloud storage, it means a doctor who is not even in the rural area, who is not on the ground, can access the same information from any patient and it helps in making an informed decision,” he added.
According to UNICEF, pneumonia, which is a severe lung infection, kills up to 24,000 Ugandan children under the age of five per year, many of whom are misdiagnosed as having malaria. It also said that most of the 900,000 annual deaths of children under five due to pneumonia occur in south Asia and sub-Saharan Africa.
Source: New Vision
