Engineer develops app to improve disease diagnosis
Mr Sir Khoi Khoi (right) demonstrates how the app works at his office in Mbarara City on June 2, 2023. PHOTO | FELIX AINEBYOONA
What you need to know:
- Mr Khoi Khoi said the application costs as low as Shs180,000, appealing to the government to integrate it in the health care system.
A biomedical engineer in Mbarara City has developed an application (app) to improve communication between patients and doctors.
Mr Sir Khoi Khoi said he innovated the app codenamed Koinology to help health facilities do patient proper disease diagnosis.
“With this innovation, we are looking at how a patient and the doctor interact so as to get the right diagnosis and the right treatment. Because you find that if a doctor and the patient do not speak the same language, then there will be no privacy between a patient and a doctor,” he said during an interview on Friday.
The application has 45 languages embedded. They include; Runyakore, Luganda, Kiswahili, Kinyarwanda, Rutoro, Runyoro, Rukiiga, Rukonzo, English, French, Chinese, Latin, German, Spanish, Hindi, Portuguese, Greek, Arabic, Japanese, Persian, Russian,Tamil Urdu, Lahnda, Vietnamese, Telugu, Marathi, Italian, Korean, Bengali, Hindi, Malay.
“The application translates your voice to languages of your choice. So, you use a headset and connect your phone with Bluetooth and you are good to go. You interact with your doctor in any language you understand. And the doctor will respond in the language he understands,” Mr Khoi Khoi said. He said the application is only effective when one has a smartphone.
He said foreign doctors who come to Uganda to offer specialised medical services usually find it hard to communicate with the local people.
He said due to language barrier, hospitals hire interpreters, which affects the privacy of a patient.
The Dean School of Medicine at Mbarara University Science and Technology (MUST), Dr Joseph Ngonzi, welcomed the application.
“An app that is going to help a health care provider communicate with a patient in her mother tongue or in language they best understand will go a long way in improving patient care,” he said.
He said he at least receives two patients on a daily basis who do not speak the language he understands, which forces him to look for interpreters.
“Where I work, we receive patients who speak French, Kinyarwanda, Lingala and communication becomes hard. We have to get an interpreter and the interpreters are not readily available. So, that app will definitely bridge the gap for us to deliver better health care to the clients we have,” Dr Ngonzi, who is also an obstetrician and gynaecologist at Mbarara Regional Referral Hospital (MRRH), said.
Mr Khoi Khoi said the application costs as low as Shs180,000, appealing to the government to integrate it in the health care system.
“We can extend this innovation to reach all hospitals, especially government hospitals,” he said.
