Tumba College student invents life saving app

One day Ange Uwambajimana accompanied her brother to hospital where he was immediately admitted. Uwambajimana had no choice other than staying by her brother’s bedside in hospital. At hospital, she was supposed to take care of everything to ensure that her brother got everything he needed. One day, while she was away without any nurse in the vicinity, her brother’s intravenous solution ran out. “His arm began to swell and one could see changes in his body, nurses told us afterwards that it was dangerous and his arm could have become paralyzed or face severe health infections,” said Uwambajimana. The student at Tumba College of Technology (TCT) realised that the real cause was that the nurse was either too busy with other patients or simply forgot to replenish the drip. As a student in the college’s electronics and telecommunications department, she decided to develop an ICT application that could alert nurses and health practitioners in case a patient needs their immediate attention. “I started carrying out research and designed my project, now I have come up with the solution,” she said. Uwambajemariya developed an Intravenous (IV) Drip Alert System which uses SMS or calls to alert the medical practitioner when it is about to get finished. About the device The IV Drip Alert device is a supplementary intravenous drip monitoring system for the drip rate of fluids being administered, using an intravenous administration set. The project was presented to the college and to various exhibitions of innovators. It was among the five projects which emerged the best in the recently concluded Miss Geek 2016 competition. Her project attracted many during an Exhibition organised by Tumba College during the annual innovation day on Wednesday. Officials said the project was impressive and an indication that Uwambajimana has been very innovative, creative and keen with her studies. “It can save lives and time, it’s affordable as it does not cost a lot of money, whenever I presented the project, people recommended it and promised to support it. I really need resources, partners like ministries, hospitals or the private sector for the project to be implemented,” she said. Uwamajimana says that to install the programme which has capacity to serve 30 patients can cost less than Rwf600,000. Other projects Uwambajimana is not the only student at the college with innovations others have also managed to design projects using technology. Imani Bora from the department of Electronics and Communications designed and developed a project called “cash water”, a prepaid water meter system that is meant to help water consumers pay before consumption as it is done when purchasing electricity using a meter known as cash power. The project was designed after it was realised that the water authority loses millions of francs annually due to unpaid bills and consumers also complained that they were being over charged. “The product was tested by the college and other officials and proved to be effective, I could develop a bigger project that can be used across that country if I got the means,” he said. Pascal Gatabazi, the college’s Principal said their responsibility was to ensure research was carried out by both staff and students to innovate and contribute towards improvement and use of technology. He said many other projects have been developed successfully in renewable energy, biogas and biomass, software development, among others. “The innovations we exhibited have played a role in socio-economic development of the community, we have environment friendly stoves, solar water heaters that we have distributed to health centres,” Gatabazi said. “We also developed software used in various programmes. The next step is putting these softwares on the market.’’ editorial@newtimes.co.rw

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Tumba College student invents life saving app