This TED Talk features biomedical engineering professor Tanya Douglas, recorded live at TED Global 2017.

This is an equipment graveyard. It's a typical final resting place for medical equipment from hospitals in Africa.

Now, why is this? Most of the medical devices used in Africa are imported,

and quite often they're not suitable for local conditions. They may require trained staff

that aren't available to operate and maintain and repair them. They may not be able to

withstand high temperatures and humidity,

and they usually require a constant and reliable supply of electricity.

An example of a medical device that may have ended up in an equipment graveyard at some point

is an ultrasound monitor to track the heart rate of unborn babies.

This is the standard of care in rich countries. In low-resour settings, the standard of care

is often a midwife listening to the baby's heart rate through a horn. Now, this approach has been around for more than a century.

It's very much dependent on the skill and the experience of the midwife.

Two young inventors from Uganda

visited an antinatal clinic at a local hospital a few years ago when they were students in information technology.

They noticed that quite often the midwife was not able to hear any heart rate

when trying to listen to it through this horn.

So they invented their own fetal heart rate monitor.

They adapted the horn and connected it to a smartphone.

An app on the smartphone records the heart rate,

analyzes it, and provides the midwife

with a range of information on the status of the baby.

These inventors are called Erin Tushabhe and Joshua O'Kello.

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