News and Events

IUIU Innovates a Device for Country-wide Reporting and Visualization of Infectious Diseases’ Outbreak Data

• 17th January, 2023 10:58am

The Islamic University in Uganda’s Research and Innovation Laboratory, Motion Analysis Research Laboratory (MARL), has innovated a very easy to use device for reporting and visualizing country-wide data on hospital-managed cases of infectious diseases (e.g COVID19, Ebola, etc). The innovation is motivated by the most recent outbreaks of COVID-19 and Ebola.

How it works: The Innovation has three integrated components (i.e the light-weight Device, a Mobile Application, and a Web-based Application). Hospitals and Health Centers handling infectious diseases country-wide, would only have to acquire this innovated small light-weight device in-order for them to continuously and seamlessly report cases pertaining to a particular infectious disease. The device runs on two small rechargeable batteries and requires a registered SIM Card to be installed for it to serve its purpose. It has 6 simple push buttons at the moment, which represent 2 infectious diseases (i.e 3 buttons for each disease). For each disease there is a yellow button representing "a new active case", a green button representing "a recovered case", and the red button representing "a death case".  All that the health center has to keep doing, is to push the respective button whenever one of the three cases for a particular infectious disease is confirmed (i.e either a new active case, a recovered case, or a death case), and the device immediately transmits that case report alongside the GPS coordinates of the device (i.e the health center) to the Cloud. Then through the custom-built mobile and web applications, the general public is able to instantly view region-specific, hospital-specific, and even country-level statistics and trends of the infectious disease, for a specified period of time. For now, the device has been programmed to report on COVID-19 and Ebola, but it can be reconfigured to report cases for any number of infectious diseases outbreaks in a country.

Why this Innovation and why now? This innovation will ease both the reporting and access to infectious disease outbreak information, country-wide. Since the world is just recovering from COVID19, and Uganda in particular just recently has had Ebola too, this innovation adds to the readiness and preparedness of the country in the handling of infectious disease outbreaks in the future. Very often, much of the general public does not comply with government directives, for lack of trust and confidence in information shared by public health authorities, especially on the spread of the disease. But with this innovation, the general public would be having real-time access to outbreak data as relayed from hospitals managing cases of a particular outbreak, at anytime and anywhere. This innovation will also allow public health authorities to dynamically and promptly respond to areas and hospitals as per the needs on ground, since there would be real-time data coming in continuously from all hospitals country-wide.

Innovators: The innovation was made by IUIU’s MARL Staff members: - Dr Umar Yahya, Mr. Mwaka Lucky, Mr. Matsiko Innocent, Mr. Pembe Fahad, and Mr. Ssegawa Abdul-Karim.

The innovation has successfully been filed for intellectual property rights protection with Uganda Registration Services Bureau (URSB), under a pending utility model application number: UG/U/2023/000002. The University is now actively exploring potential partners with whom to commercialize this innovation, both locally and globally. The Rector and the entire IUIU community are proud of this innovation and the team behind it.