ERQ MA’ED Media and Mental Health

23, March 2022 - 08:10 | COVID-19 Health Innovations

Erq Ma’ed works to bring a mentally stable society, psychologically healed generation and consciously decision-making community by using social media to drive social change with an aggregate of more than 5 Million Facebook and YouTube engagements. Erk Mead Media and Communication is a pioneering centre in Ethiopia that offers social awareness, psychological therapy, psychosocial training for youth, couples and marriage counselling and support for children and families. The programme includes support offered through a bi-weekly radio show on mental health, depression, forgiveness therapy, reconciliation, trauma and child and women psychosocial health Mental and psycho-social health.

Erq Ma’ed receives over 20,000 calls for assistance each year from across the country. Most calls are for issues related to domestic and sexual violence, marriage crises, trauma, depression, low self-esteem, inappropriate parenting/child abuse, economic problems and compounded stress. The organization provides support free of charge to over 2000 people/year and subsidizes the cost of this service by hosting a weekly radio program which has millions of listeners and sponsors who buy airtime for commercial advertisement services.

TrueSpec

22, March 2022 - 08:00 | COVID-19 Health Innovations

TrueSpec is a portable device and application that uses artificial intelligence called RAI (Real Active Ingredient) to allow hospitals, pharmacies, pharmaceutical laboratories and quality control centres to verify if certain drugs are genuine or falsified. This process takes less than 20 seconds and can be conducted anytime and anywhere. This solution allows the user to save money, as well as build a database to help estimate the true impact of substandard or falsified medical products and to collect, structure and systematically analyze accurate, reliable and quality data for Africa. The application was developed by TrueSpec Africa.

PapsAI

22, March 2022 - 08:00 | COVID-19 Health Innovations

PapsAI is a low-cost digital microscope slide scanner and digital health platform that can be used to diagnose cervical cancer in resource-constrained areas.  The platform utilizes an algorithms for segmentation, feature extraction and classifications that were based on online cervical cell datasets. Later, the tool was evaluated with pap smear slides from the pathology unit at Mbarara Regional Referral Hospital. Under the department of Biomedical Sciences and Engineering, PapsAI has been developed for automated diagnosis and classification of cervical cancer from pap smear images. The tool also takes into consideration the patient’s cervical cancer risk factors. A cytopathologist analyses the patient’s cervical cancer risk factors and the tool generates a result on the possibility of cervical cancer. Subsequently, the cytopathologist can upload the pap-smear to segment the image using the developed techniques and extract cell features. The tool can then give the diagnosis and stage of cervical cancer, as per the cervix cell changes from the pap-smear. The automated digital microscope slide scanner helps acquire quick, reliable and high-resolution digital pap-smear images from the pap-smear slides for automated analysis.