Nust ICT students create medical App

The National University of Science and Technology’s thrust to nurture female students in technical subjects previously dominated by their male counterparts is bearing fruit as five of the students are on the verge of a breakthrough. The five, Samantha Gama, Gugulethu Ngwenya, Novuyo Tsambani, Maureen Mpofu and Petronella Muzondo have come up with a cloud based application C-Casualty that will enable both patients and doctors to remotely access medical files without any need to start pre-investigation should a patient change doctors.

The five are being mentored by the university’s ICT user support and training manager Novuyo Bobo.

The girls’ internet based solution is stored in the cloud (online) and it conveniently gives access to relevant practitioners in real time, which will result in them doing away with the paper file system that has greatly affected efficiency in most medical institutions that are still heavily dependent on the hard copy file system.

In order to verify its efficiency in real life situations the university is already lobbying Mpilo Hospital, the biggest government owned hospital in Bulawayo, to prototype the solution, giving it a real world experience before officially applying it to various institutions.

Bobo said that the beauty of the programme is that it’s already offering a solution to well known problems in Zimbabwe.

“We take pride in the solutions these girls have created, one of them is the C-casualty, a cloud based platform that will seamlessly avail patients database and make updating and background checks a reality from anywhere in the world,” she said.

The major problem however, has been the general bureaucratic resistance to technological solutions from the decision makers who generally are not from the technological era as they’re sceptical about technology and the new solutions they don’t necessarily understand.

The girls said they find coding or programming equally exciting and achievable although most people perceive it as one of the most challenging courses in Information Communication Technology.

They added that they had managed to learn various programming languages and platforms through undertaking their various degree programmes in technology which enabled them to design standard web based software and mobile apps.

They however said their challenge has been on adapting and creating these solutions for various platforms to be universally applicable as it takes extra resources and different learning skills to be able release such solutions for various operating systems and platforms.

“Today, android, a Google-based operating system has become the most popular platform to develop applications on and this is the only mobile platform we then finally have exposure to and hence we limit our market,” said Gama.

Ngwenya bemoaned the bureaucratic process in the public sector as this frustrates them and diverts their focus from their primary focus which should be developing the product not marketing it which is outside their field of study.

Tsambani said the parties that they had approached had brought up the issue of ownership of the application. “They all want to know who owns the data and software and how that ownership will be affected once we enter into an agreement of running it, which presents a complexity as no one can exclusively own them,” she said.

Mpofu said their other challenge was on fears over the privacy of patients records, which are supposed to be strictly confidential.

The students however vowed to soldier on despite the challenges as they were optimistic that these will be overcome since they are already getting help from strategic partners in their quest to penetrate the market.

Besides the C_Casualty solution, the students have also developed many other applications that are ready to be deployed into the market once they are registered.

The students have also taken part in various technological challenges for women including the popular TechnoVation challenge where their software solution was the second best after another invention by University of Zimbabwe students.

They received an Arduino board as their award.- Technomag.