Status and solutions to medical device regulations for improving the healthcare landscape in Africa.

For different reasons most African countries have a poor public healthcare system compared to developed countries. Despite an increasing number of patients they often lack skilled health workers as well as basic medical equipment. This paper focuses on the development of an affordable and sustainable system for medical device regulations to provide safe, effective and quality healthcare products for Africa. Furthermore, it is determined whether Open Source Medical Devices are an effective alternative for medical device regulations to increase innovations in Africa.

Rapid prototyping of pulse oximeter.

Measurement of oxygen saturation levels in blood is a vital activity during most medical treatments. A pulse oximeter is a device most commonly used to perform this measurement. It provides convenient, non-invasive and continuous monitoring of oxygen levels in a human body. However, it is often a tedious task to select the appropriate hardware and software components to manufacture a pulse oximeter that gives accurate results. This paper describes a student project, which had the goals to expose the student to this important technique of applying rapid prototyping methods to the design of a state of the art pulse oximeter.

Detection of hypervolemia with embedded systems.

This work presents methods of biomedical signal processing and interpretation to detect hypervolemia as a cause for oxygen delivery disturbances. A model of the disease patterns for this respiratory disorder is derived and implemented on an embedded system. The model is designed in stateflow and simulated with Matlab using a database of intensive care unit patients to proved inputs for verification. The implementation is done over a wireless micro controller network.