Introducing a smart jacket to diagnose pneumonia faster than a doctor

A team of engineers from Uganda introduced a smart jacket that can diagnose pneumonia quicker than a doctor, with a desire to fight against a disease that kills more children than any other.

The idea first resonated with Olivia Koburongo when her grandmother became ill and was bounced around from hospital to hospital before properly being diagnosed with pneumonia. She presented her idea to telecommunications engineering graduate Brian Turyabagye, and the two with a team of doctors came up with the “Mama-Ope” (Mother’s Hope) kit consisting of a biomedical smart jacket and mobile app that diagnoses it.

“It was too hard to keep track of her vitals, of how she's doing, and that is how I thought of a way to automate the whole process and keep track of her health,” Koburongo said.

The Mama-Ope kit is simple to use. Health workers just have to place the jacket on the desired patient (adult or child), and its sensors detect sound patterns from the lungs, temperature, and breathing rate. The discovered information is sent to a smartphone app via Bluetooth, which then analyzes and compares the data to known statistics in order to get an estimate of the strength of the disease.

While the smart jacket is still in its prototype stage, it can already diagnose pneumonia up to three times quicker than a doctor and also reduce human error. As standard practice, doctors use a stethoscope to listen for abnormal bubbling or crackling sounds in the lungs. But if medics believe it’s malaria or tuberculosis (which also includes respiratory pain), the time lost could result in death for the patient with pneumonia.

“The problem we're trying to solve is diagnosing pneumonia at an early stage before it gets severe, and we're also trying to solve the problem of not enough manpower in hospitals because currently, we have a doctor to patient ratio that is one to 24,000 in the country,” said Koburongo.

The team plans to have the kit placed in Uganda’s referral hospitals first and then be distributed to remote health centers. Once the information is captured on the cloud storage, a doctor not even in the area or on the ground can access the data from the patient and help make an informed decision.

Patenting the kit is in the process for the team and is shortlisted from the 2017 Royal Academy of Engineering Africa Prize.

“Once it is successful (in Uganda), we hope it is rolled out to other African countries and major parts of the world where pneumonia is killing thousands of children,” Koburongo said.

Source: Medical Xpress