Meet Arthur Zang, A Cameroonian Engineer behind the Cardiopad: A Revolutionary Touchscreen Medical Tablet.
Arthur Zang is a living testament of how innovative the African technicians and engineers have become over the last few decades. Arthur Zang is credited for inventing an ingenious medical tablet called the Cardiopad tablet.
Unlike other available medical technologies, the Cardiopad tablet enables doctors to conduct heart examinations like the Electrocardiogram (ECG) to very remote and rural locations. It does this by enabling the results of medical test to be transferred electronically to doctors who will then be able to conduct diagnosis and recommend various treatment methods. This is very useful in very remote areas of Cameroon where patients have to travel for miles to reach the nearest health facility which are usually in urban areas. It not only cuts down on the time and energy spent by rural patients to reach the health facilities it also brings the health practitioners closer to the people remotely.
Mr. Zang’s invention is the first full touch screen tablet meant for medical use, that has been made in Cameroon and Africa in general. It has the potential of saving many lives and Zang says that the tablet is 97.5 percent reliable. What motivated Mr. Zang to create the tablet was to enable patients with heart diseases from remote parts of Africa be able to get diagnosis of the condition in time and thus seek the treatment required in the early stages of the heart disease or complication. There have been several tests that have been carried out using the tablet and it gave impressive performance which lead to its validation by the Cameroonian Scientific community.
The first report the Cardiopad was quoted as, “the tablet is used as a classical electrocardiograph device: electrodes are placed on the patient and connected to a module that, in turn, connects to the tablet. When a medical examination is performed on a patient in a remote village, for example, the results are transmitted from the nurse’s tablet to that of the doctor who then interprets them.” Basically the tablet is equipped with software which enables the doctor to give computer assisted diagnosis.
This invention by Zang goes a long way in helping Cameroon which has a population of more than 20 million people, yet the number of heart surgeons lies at just around 30. To add salt to the wound, majority of these heart surgeons are only found in Yaounde and Douala which are the two most important and influential economic hubs in Cameroon. Considering all this, it is easy to see how Zang’s Cardiopad plays an important role in mitigating this big deficit in terms of heart disease medical practitioners.
Prior to Zang’s invention, patients suffering heart ailments had to travel long distances to the urban centers in order for them to undergo examination. Even if they could, the sheer numbers of the patients and the fact that the heart surgeons are only a handful meant that patients had to make appointments months prior. In some instances, some patients died before their scheduled date of appointment with the doctors.
With Zang’s inventions the time for diagnosis and recommending treatment is significantly cut down hence saving more lives, enabling doctors to reach more people easily and eliminates the necessity of patients having to travel long distances. The Cardiopad tablet has already elicited a lot of interest in medical circles and the African tech.
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