Afe Babalola University (ABUAD) to represent Africa in America
…invents Asthmavisor
Four students of Afe Babalola University, Ado-Ekiti (ABUAD) have put the five-year old university on the world map again by qualifying for the finals of this year’s edition of Imagine Cup organized Microsoft Incorporation
The race commenced with the competition among higher institutions in Nigeria which ABUAD won to qualify for the African Zone (Semi-finals) where it defeated higher institutions in other African countries including Burkina Faso, South Africa, Uganda, Egypt, Angola, Algeria and Morocco as well as Tunisia to qualify for the Worldfinals.
This feat is predicated on the quartet’s invention of Asthmavisor, a device for a more effective and efficient way of managing Asthma, particularly among children.
For this rare invention, the students made up of three Computer Science students and one Mechanical Engineering student will be representing Nigeria and Africa at the 33-nation finals of this year’s edition of Imagine Cup slated for July 31, 2015 at the Microsoft Headquarters in Seattle, United States of America.
The foursome of Adeyemo Oluwaseun Kayode, Raymond Obinaju, Sobola Timilehin David, and Ahwin Kevin with a joint passion for saving lives, has continually been seeking to leverage on technology to make health care more efficient, accessible and reliable particularly as it affects the rural dwellers.
Imagine Cup is the most prestigious global student technology program and competition that provides opportunities for students across all disciplines to team up and use their creativity, passion and knowledge of technology to create applications, games and integrates solutions that can change the way we live, work and play.
This is coming nine months after Mr. Emmanuel Adegbite, a 300 Level Student in the College of Medicine and Health Sciences of the university wrote a thoroughly well- researched scientific paper on the deadly Ebola Virus Disease (EVD) that recently ravaged and traumatized the country last year.
Titled “Therapeutic Measures against the Current Virulent Endemicity of Ebola Virus”, Adegbite’s paper was published by the Nigerian-based International Science Journal Publication in the October edition of the Science Journal of Medicine and Clinical Trials.
Christened Team Lifewatch, the ABUAD students qualified for the finals after successfully identifying a major (health) problem and proffering a novel solution using available technology, scaling the preliminaries by defeating other contestants, including Team Paradigm, the 2014 Image Cup Winner and by defeating nine other countries (in the African Zone) at the semi-finals to coast home to the finals.
The Team Lifewatch presentation (AsthmaVisor Solution) consists of a Mobile Application operating alongside a wearable device, which monitors and supervises asthmatic patients’ health status, ensuring that they stay safe and well informed of their environments. It is a solution geared towards a more cost-effective and efficient way of supervising asthmatic patients, especially children. AsthmaVisor would be used around the globe in all communities (rural and urban) where there are adults and children alike who suffer from this disease.
The solution will help patients to be more conscious of their environment and will provide a reminder of what their physician has advised them to avoid. The software also provides an automatic alert, which is triggered by change in environmental condition as detected by the sensors in the wearable. AsthmaVisor further helps the patient alert a selected list of emergency contacts in case he or she is not able to handle an attack.
Some of the benefits AsthmaVisor to Asthma patient include Environmental awareness to situations that could trigger an asthma attack, provision of helpful health tips that could prolong the life of the patients and crucial supervisory role-playing and monitoring as well as creating avenue for patients to track their attacks and log crucial information.