Project Lead(s): Myshkin Ingawale
Issue
Anemia affects 1.6 billion people worldwide and causes more than 1 million deaths per year, mostly women and children in low-resource settings in the developing world.
Treatment for anemia is well known and widely available. The problems include timely detection, regular monitoring and compliance of treatment.
Solution
ToucHb empowers village health workers in the developing world with a simple, needle-free, hand-held, battery-operated device to quickly check for and periodically monitor hemoglobin levels in women and children at the point of care.
Proof of concept for this non-invasive anemia device consisted of developing and refining the ToucHb device, validating it in both clinical and field settings, and setting up processes to comply with ISO 13485 and European regulatory standards.
Outcome
The project resulted in the development and validation of a robust, affordable and accurate, non-invasive anemia screening system.
The accuracy of TouchHb was validated in the field: more than 95% of results fell within +/-2 g/dl of reference with and a correlation coefficient of 0.79.
Over the course of pilot testing, the study team observed that reporting data from the field and tracking usage was a major pain point for most health agencies.
ToucHb v2.0 comes with an in-built SIM card-based connectivity system, which sends non-confidential test data to our secure servers. This is then visualized on a back-end, web-based solution to track device usage, as well as prevalence of anemia in a geographic area over a period of time.
The project team intends to apply to Grand Challenges Canada for scale-up funding.