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Charles C. Onu, from Nigeria, has developed Ubenwa, a mobile application that analyzes a baby’s cry to detect early signs of abnormalities which could be fatal such as asphyxia (lack of oxygen) or brain-injury. In fact, the machine learning system developed by the Ubenwa team takes the infant cry as input and then analyzes the amplitude and frequency patterns in the cry to provide instant diagnosis of birth asphyxia.
Ubenwa, in Igbo language spoken in Nigeria, means the cry of a child. Ubenwa is a project that Charles Onu first presented in December 2015 at the Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) conference. In March 2019, WHO (World Health Organization) recognized Ubenwa as one of top 30 healthcare innovations in Africa.
Source: ubenwa.ai
The current method for detecting asphyxia uses a blood gas analyzer, which means that blood sample must be taken from the newborn; whereas Ubenwa only records the baby’s cry to detect a possible abnormality. The latter is, therefore, non-invasive and much faster as Ubenwa gives the results in about 10 seconds. It is also about 95% cheaper that current clinical alternative and requires almost no medical skills to operate. It is reported that birth asphyxia is responsible for the death of about 1.2 million infants per year. These lives could be saved thanks to Ubenwa.
Charles Onu is among the many talents that Africa should not only celebrate, but mostly value to make Africa a better place to live in. Indeed, he has experience in Software Engineering and Machine Learning, and also carries out research in Artificial Intelligence and Biomedical Engineering.