As Senegal grapples with coronavirus pandemic, engineering students in the country have joined the fight with various inventions such as medical robots and automatic sanitizer dispenser.
Students in one of the top universities in Dakar have volunteered to use their technical skills to ease pressure on hospitals and wards through the use of their innovations.
One good example of this is ‘Dr Car’, a robot invented by students of Dakar’s Ecole Superieure Polytechnique (ESP), one of the best universities in West Africa, to measure patients’ blood pressure and temperature.
According to one of the students inventing the robot, Mouhamed Kebe, the machine would help reduce rate of exposure to infected persons and use of expensive protective gear.
The robot has a mounted camera and could be controlled via an app. Doctors would be able to treat people in isolation and communicate with patients without having to be physically present with the patients.
“At a certain point … we realized that medical equipment was limited. We can do something,” said, Kebe.
Senegalese doctors are showing great interest in the inventions that look promising to help save lives and minimize rates of infections among doctors and nurses and other health workers.
Senegal, a country of about 16 million people faces the threat of spike in infections as the number of cases keeps soaring every day.
As of Wednesday the country has recorded about 1,700 confirmed cases with 19 deaths. Given the ill-equipped facilities in the country, health staff are also getting infected with the deadly virus which is a threat to the Senegalese frontline health workers.
In a Dakar hospital, Abdoulaye Bousso who is the head of emergency word commended the invention but asked that an upgrade should be made to the earlier prototype which is a small mobile trolley to deliver equipment or meals to patients.
Abdoulaye requested mechanical arms that could carry out medical testing should be a feature of the robot. He however admittedly said, “It’s a whole process.”
An Ecole Superieure Polytechnique professor, Ndiaga Ndiaye, said that the robot is very essential and could be produced in a larger scale as soon as it is ready because the robot is “far from being a gadget”.
He further said that such an inventionis a reflection of the university’s emphasis on practical projects and entrepreneurship.
“We are a public institution. There is one concept that binds us all together, and that is service to the community,” he said.
Similarly, Gianna Andjembe, a master student in electrical engineering, among other students has also designed an automatic hand-sanitizer dispenser which he said would help reduce the need for hand-washing supervision by schools and hospitals.
“It’s very simple, it’s basic. As scientists, as engineers, we have to meet the challenges and really take our destiny into our own hands,” said Andjembe.
