The Journal of mHealth Vol 1 Issue 4 (Aug 2014) | Page 24

Rolex Awards for Enterprise Recognise mHealth Innovators
Continued from page 21

he says. He also wants to export the
device to other regions such as central
Africa and India. The Cardio Pads are
currently produced in China. Over the
next decade, Zang hopes to shift production to Cameroon, enabling his country
to benefit economically as well.
The Cardio Pad is just the first step in
Arthur Zang’s mission to bring better
health care to his country. He aims to set
up Cardioglob, an integrated nationwide
network of hospitals and cardiologists,
allowing comprehensive data management and cardiac services. Zang also
intends to develop a family of medical
devices and technologies, such as simple
ultrasound equipment, for use in rural
areas. And he is already planning his next
invention, a beeper to allow patients to
alert their doctors in medical emergencies.

Neeti Kailas

Detecting Infant Hearing
Loss
Neeti Kailas is a designer who wants to
make a difference, improving life opportunities for hearing-impaired children by
detecting infant hearing loss early on.
Her passion for design is coupled with
a desire to transform healthcare in India,
and she has used her skills to create a
non-invasive portable device that screens
newborn babies for hearing impairment.
Together with her engineer husband
Nitin Sisodia, Kailas launched the
Sohum Innovation Lab, and the lab’s
first product is a device to screen babies
for hearing loss. Kailas is personally connected to the project, through an Indian
childhood friend who was born with
hearing problems. “She’s had a totally
different life to the rest of us, with very
few opportunities,” says Kailas. Her

22

August 2014

friend is just one of many. Every year,
some 100,000 hearing-impaired babies
are born in India, but there is no routine screening countrywide to detect
the condition, and the existing tests are
expensive and require skilled health-care
workers. Early screening is vital because,
if left unaddressed, by the time the baby
is six months old, a hearing impairment
can impede the development of speech,
language and cognition.
Kailas’s device works by measuring auditory brainstem response. Three electrodes are placed on the baby’s head to
detect electrical responses generated by
the brain’s auditory system when stimulated. If the brain does not respond to
these aural stimuli, the child cannot
hear. The device is battery-operated and
non-invasive, which means babies do
not need to be sedated, as some previous tests have required. Since the device
is inexpensive and portable, it can be
used anywhere. “Another of the device’s
major advantages over other testing systems is our patented, in-built algorithm
that filters out ambient noise from the
test signal. This was really important for
us because, if you’ve ever been to health
clinics in India, you’ll know how incredibly crowded and noisy they are,” says
Kailas.
The device is still a prototype, and Rolex
Award funds will allow Kailas to start
clinical trials later this year. Her plan is
to launch the device in 2016, first focusing on institutional (hospital) births, with
the aim of screening 2 per cent of such
births in the first year, before scaling up

on an annually accrued basis.
If the clinical trials prove successful,
Kailas and her partner will be embarking
on an ambitious project that she hopes
will ultimately allow every single baby
born in India to be screened for hearing
impairment. Kailas acknowledges that
ensuring this happens in a country like
India – with its complex, chaotic healthcare system – is “a tall order”, but she
has devised an innovative approach to
rolling out the technology through pediatricians, maternity homes, health-care
workers and entrepreneurs, who will buy
the devices and then charge a small fee
for every test. A door-to-door service will
be particularly important in rural areas,
where health clinics are scarce. While it
is an untested approach, Kailas is confident that it will work. “Indians don’t
need much encouragement to become
entrepreneurs. When the IT boom hit,
for example, Internet cafés mushroomed
all over the country,” she says.
Kailas’s hope is that the screening programme can be adapted to include
screening for impaired vision in newborns, or for identifying high-risk pregnancies.
Talking to The Journal of mHealth
Kailas describes the inspiration for the
company. “Sohum Innovation lab India
Pvt Ltd was founded in 2012 with the
mission to make innovative technology
based, product and service solutions and
implement them with a self-sustaining
business model to tackle daunting problems in resource-poor settings. These