A team of Ugandan innovators have developed a smart kit called MamaOpe that can detect pneumonia early in children. It consists of a wearable and a mobile phone application both of which help in the diagnosis.
The team comprises of Besufekad Shifferaw who is the lead technical developer, Brian Turyabagye, a telecoms engineer, Olivia Koburongo who is the project manager. They’re joined by Dr. Rodney Sekate, a medical consultant and Angella Namwase who is a medical researcher.
We use mobile technology to reduce the child mortality rate given that pneumonia is the leading child killer in Uganda and the world more that HIV, malaria and measles combined as reported by WHO. This we do by ruling out misdiagnosis of the disease with malaria which was reported as among the reasons for the increasing deaths by the Uganda Pediatrics Association (UPA), reads a statement on their blog.
Mamaope (awaiting certification) makes possible a detailed analysis and preliminary diagnosis of individual lung crackles through digitized audio obtained from the patient’s chest.
The kit with its improved accuracy is said to diagnose pneumonia four times faster than a health practitioner would. Using sensors, the jacket(Kit) listens to body reactions at particular points of interest, such as the lung crepitations and wheezes, measures the breathing rate, then processes and analyses this information to give a deduction. The jacket then computes the results and sends the results to a mobile app using bluetooth connection. The app then gives a conclusive result to the user, according to Techweez.
