On 25th October 2019, three students from the Innovation Lab shared their projects on ‘Smart stethoscope’ and ‘Nutrition’ at the Digital Bridge Forum in Astana Hub. The three residents are fully devoted to achieving changes within their community by their inventions. UNICEF talks with them about their projects and experiences.
Joined by the ambition to detect heart diseases at an earlier stage, Aidar Batyrbekov and 2 other young people (Comry Khaled & Momynkulov Zeynel) met by chance and ended up creating the smart stethoscope project with their idea of crafting an application to record the heartbeat and analyze the illnesses at ease.
From prototype to product, it takes the group for 5 months to launch the whole project. They are required to ask for permissions from patients, collect data in the hospital. Without their determination in investing in the application, the analysis could never be reached. For now, this application is still at a preliminary stage, Aidar believes it requires to be finalized in 3 months by ensuring its accuracy and controlling its stability. Ultimately, he wants to expand its database and engage with the diagnosis of other diseases, contributing to the betterment of the society.
Another youngster, Ayan Akkassov, 19, realizing the severity of child obesity in Kazakhstan. He then committed to establishing an application which allows parents to understand the healthy level of the food easily before purchasing.
He then develops an application for showing the nutrition level of food based on the developed colouring system. As long as you scan the barcode of a food product, the apps will show the user a ‘nutri-score’ of 7 colours, from green to red. The colour of green represents the healthiest food, while red represents the harmful food. Alongside with the nutri-score, the apps can also show the ingredients within the product, so one can be rest assured of what they are actually consuming.
The labelling of different colours is based on the suggested daily intake for a normal adult from the World Health Organization. It identifies how much sugar, salt and saturated fat one should consume a day. After indicating the healthy level of the food, the application will even suggest a replacement for the harmful product, if possible.
This is not the end of the application. For the second phase of the apps, the user can even track for their physical activity daily, as a reminder for incorporating exercises into their daily routines.
Things are not that easy. Collecting data for each product and collecting the appropriate amount of products undoubtedly are a few of the obstacles he encountered. As Kazakhstan hasn’t developed a comprehensive system in restricting the food label on the product, some of the information is, therefore, hard to trace. Not to mention, the name of some ingredients are misleading; customers may easily fall into such a trap. However, he has done great strides in collecting data from the categories of chips, drinks and biscuits. Even though he is only managed to consolidate 15 products from the database, however, he believes that an expansion of its scope and amount of food will be done after building his ground-up and fully examine the customer\’s feedback.
Fueled by passion and enthusiasm, we believe Ayan will be able to develop the successful \’Nutrition\’ app in the near future.
By visioning the future of digital health, both teenagers believe technology is an indispensable part of Kazakhstan’s future medical development. They are both optimistic about advanced technology.
With the help of technology, these young people are the agent of change for every child. With their innovations, they are not only helping thousands of children in Kazakhstan, but for the betterment for every child in the world.
Young people are the future of our society. Aidar and Ayan fully demonstrated their sheer determination and perseverance in making a change for solving the pressing problems related to children and adolescents using information technology. UNICEF Innovation Lab will continue to support passionate youth and partners around innovative solutions that have had a positive impact on the lives of the most vulnerable children and their families.
https://www.unicef.org/kazakhstan/en/stories/generation-unlimited-innovation-future
