27-year-old, Marc Arthur Zang, has invented the ‘CardioPad’ — a portable heart monitor that allows heart patients, wherever they are in Cameroon, to be remotely checked over by a cardiologist. CardioPad is a touch screen medical tablet that enables heart examinations, such as ECGs, to be performed at remote, rural locations while the results of the test are transferred wirelessly to specialists for interpretation.
The 25-centimeter touch screen connects to electrodes placed on a patient’s heart and transmits a digitized heart signal via a Bluetooth connection over a mobile network. The invention has been validated by the Cameroon scientific community as extremely effective. The CardioPad has a seven-hour battery and the ECG examination can be performed in just five minutes. The CardioPad costs €1,500, while the current price for an electrocardiograph is €3,800. The accuracy of the tablet’s results is 97.5%.
In 2009, Arthur Zang, a young computer engineer, needed additional training and $45,000 to develop the device. However, his family did not have the money and banks consistently turned him down for loans. When he shared his idea on social media he found an unexpected investor — Cameroon President, Paul Biya, who personally gave him the funds. Zang received €30,000 from the Cameroonian government to develop his prototype. Once the prototype was successful, he found a factory in China to produce the CardioPads. Zang got free online training from the Indian Institute of Technology.
For his mobile cardiology invention that has the potential save millions of lives, Zang was recognized as one of TIME Magazine’s ’30 People Under 30 Who are Changing the World’ and one of Forbes Magazine’s ’30 Under 30′ list. He also received the 2013 African Mobile Award and he was the recipient of a 2014 Rolex Award for Enterprise, which gave him the funds to produce 100 tablets. On April 13th, 2015, Zang was nominated, along with nine others out of almost a thousand applicants, for the Innovation Prize for Africa. The winner will receive $150,000 for their respective project.
Approximately 22 million people live in Cameroon, but there are only 40 heart surgeons in the country, most based in big cities making it difficult for the poor, rural population to access heart specialists in time. Medical staff at the Bafia hospital have already started using the CardioPad on its patients and receiving positive response. “It has been about a year now that they said I had a cardiovascular disease. I have been travelling to the city to take treatment. But since they brought this machine [device], they just put the machine on me and I no longer travel to the city. It was expensive for me,” said 55-year-old patient, Simplice Momo.
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who ever said that Africans have never invented or contributed to the world will have to swallow their words. Only greatness will come from the African soil.