Neopenda, a healthtech startup creating solutions that give patients in low-resource settings access to high-quality care, is among the startups based in Africa that have been selected to join the 2018 MIT Solver class after scoring wins at last week’s MIT Solve Global Challenge finals.
Neopenda was founded in 2016 by Sona Shah and Teresa Cauvel, who were biomedical engineering students at Columbia University.
The idea to build the startup came about after Shah, now the CEO, spent a few months in western Kenya, where she worked with a pharmaceutical company.
During her stay, she has told media, she realized that babies born with complications face long odds of survival in countries where medical staff and equipment are in short supply.
One time, Shah and Cauvel got an opportunity to “travel to Uganda to conduct a needs assessment, and found that there was such a scarcity of functional medical equipment in so many of the hospital wards, primarily because the commercially available products did not meet the design constraints of low-resource hospitals,” Shah has told DisruptAfrica.
“After the trip, Teresa and I decided to start Neopenda to engineer medical devices for where they are needed most.”
Their first product called Neopenda is a small wearable device that monitors the vital signs of critically ill newborns being cared for in hospitals in low-resource areas.
The device wirelessly transmits data to a centralized app, allowing a single nurse to monitor multiple newborns at once.
This solution is being designed hand-in-hand with nurses and doctors in Uganda, to ensure it will meet the needs and constraints of low-resource settings.
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MIT Solve Global Challenge
Neopenda was selected alongside 33 Solver teams at an event held in New York on September 23.
Each of the members of the Solver class will benefit from $10 000 (about Shs38 million) in funding as well as mentorship and support from the Solve community.
The class will over the next year collaborate with Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)’s Solve initiative on their solutions.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)’s Solve initiative seeks to crowd-solve four global challenges — economic prosperity, health, learning, and sustainability — through open innovation.
The MIT Solve Challenge finals featured a group of 60 finalists selected from across the initiative’s four global challenges: Coastal Communities, Frontlines of Health, Teachers and Educators, and Work of the Future.
The winners from Africa are from Uganda, Kenya, Rwanda and Nigeria.
Neopenda has previously participated in more than 20 IT competitions, including emerging as outstanding IoT Project at the 2018 Computing Big Data Awards and coming in the first place at the Cisco Internet of Everything Challenge at the 2016 Rice Business Plan Competition and 2016 Columbia University Women Entrepreneurs Pitch Competition.
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