Charging
shoes
Kenyan inventor Anthony Mutua has developed a rather ingenuous way of charging
mobile phone – using the power of pedestrians. His invention comprises of
ultra-thin chips of crystal which are fitted to the bottom of a shoe’s sole. As
the user walks, it generates electricity through the pressure exerted when it
is stepped on. The chips costs around $46, and charges the phone through an
extension cable that runs from the shoe to the pocket. Recently the project has
been granted $6,000 for further funding by Kenya’s National Council of Science
and Technology, as well as the promise of mass production to reach out to a
larger market.
Please call me
Everyday users of mobile phone technology are sometimes blissfully
unaware that the Please Call Me service was invented in Africa. The service
allows users who have no airtime to send a Please Call Me text message to any
number to alert the receiver that they wish to be called back. While there has
been some dispute as to who exactly invented the service, the fact remains that
it was either created by an employee of Vodacom or MTN in South Africa. Both
former Vodacom employee Nkosana Makate and ex-MTN employee Ari Kahn have laid
claims to the invention, each with their own proof, but the matter is still
being investigated in a South African court.
Cardiopad
The Cardiopad, a computer tablet that enables heart examinations like
electrocardiograms (ECG) to be conducted at remote, rural locations, was
created and developed by Cameroonian entrepreneur Marc Arthur Zang Adzaba. The
device is most effective in areas where such crucial diagnostic tests have
never been made available. While the device is currently only available in
Cameroon, Himore Medical (the company who produces the device), is said to be
in the process of marketing the unit in other African markets. According to
recent media, “this innovation will allow many heart patients to receive a
prompt diagnosis that was a luxury that they could not receive, at any price,
if they were unable to travel to an urban center.”
M-Pesa
M-Pesa is a mobile-phone based money transfer and microfinancing service which
was created for mobile operators Safaricom and Vodacom, in Kenya and Tanzania,
respectively.
The ‘M’ stands for mobile, while ‘pesa’ is the Swahili word for
money, and is currently the most developed mobile payment system in the world.
According to online sources, the service was developed following a student
software development project from Kenya in 2007, which was subsequently rolled
out by Safaricom. The service is currently in use in Kenya, Tanzania,
Afghanistan, South Africa, India and Egypt.
CAT scan
Being widely used in the medical field across the world, few patients know that
when they lie down for a computed axial tomography scan, or CAT scan, the
technology was actually invented by South African. While it was developed at
Tufts University in the UK, the person responsible for the imaging equipment
was South African physicist Allan Cormack and Godfrey Hounsfield of EMI
Laboratories. Recognizing their major efforts in the medical field, the pair
was awarded the 1979 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. According to online
sources, “Cormack’s interest in the problem of X-ray imaging of soft tissues
was first aroused when he took up the part-time position of physicist for a
hospital radiology department. In the 1960s, he provided the mathematical
technique for the CAT scan, in which an X-ray source and electronic detectors
are rotated around the body, producing a sharp map of the tissues within a
cross-section of the body.”
