Giving hope to newborns!
Ubenwa is saving newborn lives by enabling quick and cost-effective diagnosis of birth asphyxia from infant cry.
Birth Asphyxia is one of the top 3 causes of infant mortality in the world, causing the death of about 1.2 million infants and severe life-long disabilities (such as cerebral palsy, deafness, and paralysis) to an equal number annually. "If newborns who have asphyxia can be detected early enough, we may be able to save their lives" - UN.
We are developing a machine learning system that can take as input the infant cry, analyse the amplitude and frequency patterns in the cry, to provide instant diagnosis of birth asphyxia. The test results from our diagnostic software have shown a Sensitivity of over 86% and Specificity of 89%.
For testing, our algorithm has been deployed as a mobile app which harnesses the processing capabilities of smartphones to provide near-instantaneous assessment of whether or not a newborn has or is at risk of asphyxia. Ubenwa is non-invasive and can be over 95% cheaper than existing clinical alternative.
A blog post reflecting on the team's challenges and accomplishments of 2018, and providing a window into what is to come in 2019.
We participated as exhibitors at the first United Nations AI for Good Summit in Geneva. Ubenwa was represented by our lead clinician - Dr Ndiomu.
Ubenwa has been selected as one of 141 teams from around the world to compete in the IBM AI XPrize. The AI XPrize is a $5million contest aiming to reward teams applying AI to address grand challenges.
Ubenwa has been accepted into the startup mentorship program at District 3. District 3 is a leading startup accelerator based in Montreal, Canada.
In conjunction with our partners, University of Port Harcourt Teaching Hospital (UPTH), we have formally obtained ethical approval to carry out clinical trials of Ubenwa over a period of 8 months. Project will be carried out at Obio Cottage Hospital, the largest maternity centre in Port Harcourt, Nigeria.
Charles presented early work on Ubenwa at the Global Humanitarian Technology Conference (GHTC) in Silicon Valley, USA and at UNESCO's Technology for development (Tech4Dev) conference in Lausanne, Switzerland.
We began technical validation to connect newborns cry and Perinatal Asphyxia. During this period, we sought for sample data and iterated on several algorithms for predicting Asphyxia. The result was a unique algorithm.
Founder and Principal Innovator
Charles carries out research at the intersection of artificial intelligence and biomedical engineering in the Reasoning and Learning Lab at McGill University. Prior to joining the lab, he worked as a software engineer for 3 years at CypherCrescent.
Strategy Lead
Jon has a background in the arts and computer science. He co-founded and co-ran Paradem Consulting for 5 years building it into a successful software and cloud services consulting company.
Clinical Development Lead
Peace is a Consultant Neonatologist at the University of Port Harcourt Teaching Hospital, Nigeria. She is a key member of the neonatal resuscitation committee of the paediatrics association of Nigeria.
Software Engineering Lead
Innocent is a software engineer and technology entrepreneur. A graduate of the Meltwater Entrepreneurial School of Technology (MESTAfrica), he currently leads data science training at Coven Works. He also contributes to several open source projects
Artificial Intelligence
Paediatric Neurology
Professor of Biomedical Eng
Strategy
Machine Learning
Clinical Lead
