REWEBA

The growing interest in automating many aspects of our daily lives has seen an increase in the use of emerging technologies such as Internet of Things (IoT) to address numerous societal challenges. A key challenge in many developing countries is health access, especially for people in rural or marginalized communities. In this project we looked at how we can leverage on the benefits of IoT technology to reduce the high infant mortality rate brought about by poor health access. Babies are required to go for regular check-ups from birth until the age of 24 months to detect growth and general health issues for timely intervention. However, many parents are unable to do this due to the cost of this check-up, and long distances to the health centres. Health centres are also very few and constrained with the lack of adequate personnel and resources required to conduct this screening. This project presents an innovative approach to reducing infant mortality in marginalized areas by addressing the key challenge of poor health access. To fulfil this, two novel ideas are integrated in the design. Firstly, it sets out to provide a solution that can conduct the typical screening functions conducted in health centres during regular infant check-ups which are growth monitoring and general health inspection. This primarily comprises of weight and temperature measurements in many rural areas. The proposed solution however presents opportunities to enhance this process by monitoring the body mass index and the presence of skin issues. It can be scaled to take additional measurements such as the babies’ heart rate and the breathing patterns. Innovations in remote infant screening using IoT technology have so far focused on the development of monitoring infants in incubators or the development of wearable technology. Our solution presents a method of screening infants with minimal patient disturbance.

We are a team of 4 members, namely Khushi Gupta, Jeet Gohil, Dharmik Karania and Abdihamid Ali. We are all from Nairobi, Kenya and we represent United States International University - Africa. All of us are doing bachelors in computer science and all of us in our last year.