Microsoft-sponsored competition Imagine Cup has since been ended, and with its 19th annual conclusion is a set of winners that were picked from 163 countries following a rigorous technological competition.
Four of the winners were from USIU: Khushi Gupta, Jeet Gohil, Dharmik Karania, and Abdihamid Ali (Team REWEBA). The group won the primary price for their IoT-based infant monitoring solution that remotely analyzes infant parameters during post-natal screening. The solution also serves as an early warning intervention system.
The team won a grand prize of KES 800M (USD 75000). The group will also have a mentoring session with MS CEO Satya Nadella, as well as another USD 50K (KES 7.3M) in MS Azure Grant.
According to the group, Remote Well Baby (REWEBA), is an early warning system that digitally monitors babies’ growth and health parameters and sends them to doctors for timely intervention. It combines Machine Learning, IoT, Analytics, and more to provide innovative functionalities for infant screening, mimicking the process of post-natal screening in a hospital.
As has been the case, the Imagine Cup challenges students to come up with something that matters to them, and along the way, have a chance to develop their skills and have access to the tools, resources, learning materials, and mentors to help competitors bring theirs projects to life.
The team hopes to enhance and scale their project to include additional infant screening factors and a postnatal screening device for mothers, and over time, they hope to launch a start-up to support and improve healthcare access across the country. The team also hopes to expand the project throughout the African continent, and India, which they note are some of the regions with some of the highest infant mortality rates.
What they said
Before putting the project together, the four of us had interned at a local hospital, where we saw first-hand the challenges that faced mothers, especially in terms of access to healthcare for newborn babies. This lack of healthcare access, compounded by the effects of the pandemic contributed to a high mortality rate.
REWEBA Team.
Sub-Saharan Africa has the highest number of infant mortalities, highlighting the gap in healthcare services. REWEBA is the only remote healthcare solution that provides regular growth monitoring for infants from the comfort of the home, while also giving direct access to doctors for immediate intervention.
Khushi Gupta, one of the team members.
There’s a lot of technologies that we came to discover {through building our project}, for example Azure DevOps, IoT, and Functions. We learned a lot about how to build IoT systems.
Jeet Gohil, Team Member.
