Several factors are responsible for infant mortality rate in Cameroon and Africa, including the insufficiency of neonatal incubators.
With Cameroon recording more than 100,000 premature births out of close to one million births each year, incubators are a necessity in preventing the figures for infant mortality surging.
This brings us to Serge Armel Njidjou and his solution to overcome the lack of neonatal equipment in hospitals across Cameroon, Njidjou has been developing interactive incubators as a solution.
Njidjou and his team at the University Agency for Innovation (UAI) decided to embark on the design and creation of incubators to shore up the inadequacy in Cameroonian hospital after a tragic incident in 2016, where a mother lost her quintuplets in a Cameroonian hospital.
Badly bruised by that incident, he made a vow to embark on a project that will lead to the reduction of neonatal deaths, leading to the development of the home-made neonatal incubator in 2018.
Again the incubators are said to possess a special digital system feature allowing it to be remotely monitored from a smartphone as well as allowing air circulation speed, the ambient temperature, and the water level to be closely controlled. “It is by taking into account these parameters linked to our context that we designed our new incubator. We spent a whole year doing research and development. Today we have an interactive AUI 1.0 neonatal incubator. It is the first neonatal incubator entirely designed and manufactured in sub-Saharan Africa. It complies with international standard IEC-601-2-19,” Njidjou told Sputnik.
Njidjou manufactures 30 incubators monthly for a selling price of about $3,400 each, saying: “I am happy to help babies who need it. This product has also received many local and international recognitions.”
