Data Science Africa Visiting Fellowship presents exciting opportunities for its members.
The Data Science Africa Visiting Fellowship presents exciting opportunities for members of the DSA community to explore and deepen their academic and professional interests through research visits to DSA partner academic institutions. This fellowship is an opportunity for individuals to carry out independent research, to build professional links, and to develop their interests in data science and artificial intelligence research and policy.
Most importantly, participants in the fellowship get a valuable opportunity to establish connections with academic and industry experts, furthering their professional and personal development.
Details about how to participate in the fellowship will be published soon.
This work involves researching and developing methods to improve orthopedic patient recovery monitoring using computer vision based software tools. The need for orthopedic services is much greater than can be satisfied by existing personnel in Kenya. Yet, caregivers are overwhelmed by the influx of patients seeking orthopedic services such as knee replacements especially now exacerbated by lifestyle diseases. Shockingly, the existing tools such as goniometers used by orthopedic doctors and physiotherapists to monitor recovery of patients who undergo such procedures are prone to human error due to manual data entry, involve uncomfortable touch and expensive commutes to clinics. And due to their traditional data collection and storage approaches, it's difficult to draw any intelligent analyses on the trends of patients' recovery. This is where computer vision approaches become useful. Through a web application running a pose estimation model in the backend, we are building a software system that can stream patient joint movements, extract key metrics of tracking recovery such as knee flexion angles, and store that data in a database in a click. Since data is stored in a database, it can be accessed in the future and used to provide insights on recovery partners of patients therefore improving the quality of care of patients and equipping doctors to offer quality services efficiently.
Researcher
BSc. Biomedical Engineering
Advisor
Associate Professor, Dedan Kimathi University of Technology
