GIC Space, African telemedicine platform

Audio 02:11

By developing telemedicine devices in smartphones, women in remote and peri-urban areas of sub-Saharan Africa can access cancer care services more quickly.

(Illustrative photo) © Getty Images / Tim Robberts

By: Dominique Desaunay Follow

6 mins

A Cameroonian doctor has created a young company specializing in e-health to detect and diagnose cases of breast and cervical cancer remotely.

By developing telemedicine devices in smartphones, women in remote and peri-urban areas of sub-Saharan Africa can access cancer care services more quickly. 

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More than 400,000 annual deaths

and cervical cancer are to be deplored in sub-Saharan Africa. Due to the lack of early diagnosis due to the shortage of equipment and the lack of specialized therapists, women living in rural areas are the most affected by this scourge. This is the reason why the young Cameroonian doctor Conrad Tankou has developed a

called

(Global Innovation and Creativity Space) which allows oncologists to establish a remote diagnosis. This site includes online training modules for health personnel, offers isolated centers a

microscopy system.

, an intelligent and connected speculum, a simple device for biopsy by fine needle puncture, but whose samples are analyzed almost directly via a 3G network, explains

. 

RFI: What is the objective of the GIC Space telemedicine platform? 

Dr Conrad Tankou

: The general objective is to be able to facilitate the screening and diagnosis of cervical and breast cancer, which are the two most common cancers in women in sub-Saharan Africa.

With the technologies that we are in the process of developing, we are working with clinical players and health centers present in remote areas where the needs are really intense.

We are also training health personnel in these areas so that they become the main players in the development of this project.  

Rural health centers are relatively poorly equipped with training problems and suffer from a shortage of doctors specializing in cancer? 

Indeed, this is the reason why we have tried to provide suitable solutions that use the scarce existing resources, so that specialists who are few in number and live most of the time in large metropolises can remotely diagnose the problems. women wherever they are. 

Concretely, how does your telemedicine platform work, and what are all its components? 

There are five innovations that we have designed in the field of health and digital. First, we have developed a smart and connected speculum. Next, we created an intelligent smartphone microscopy system, then a fine needle biopsy device, then a telemedicine platform allowing medical data to be transferred between health centers and, finally, we developed a online training platform for staff that facilitate the learning of our techniques in a very short time. This 3D medical act simulation system is more attractive for nurses. After the training phase, these technologies are deployed in isolated health centers,but the main objective remains to collect medical data so that specialists can establish their diagnoses. For breast cancer, for example, after a fine needle biopsy, images captured with the digital microscope are sent remotely to the oncologist.   

Are the internet infrastructures sufficient to transmit this data from isolated regions? 

All our solutions are based on 3G mobile networks that exist in rural areas, but the challenge is to cover regions in which the network is deficient or sometimes non-existent! But in general our workflow works better in these places than in cities. Let me give you an example: with a 3G network, it is possible to obtain a cervical cancer diagnostic result in less than 30 minutes with our digital visual examination technique. On the other hand, if a woman has to travel to the metropolis to be screened by a specialist, it will take more than a month and will incur many expenses such as transport and accommodation to obtain the same result. For areas not covered by a mobile network,we have developed a system which records medical data in order to send them off-line with an intermittent or low-intensity telecom network. 

The ambition of your young startup is to offer these innovative medical devices within 5 years to all of sub-Saharan Africa?  

Yes, if we succeed in implementing our prevention and diagnostic solutions in remote areas of Cameroon, it will then become easy to replicate them for other regions, including adapting them for populations residing in large cities. 

Are women in rural areas currently benefiting from these connected screenings for free? 

Currently, it is free during the validation phase of our project.

Later, there will be a cost but it will be adapted according to the economic context of the patients, their low income, for example, or the difficulties of access to medical care for people living in isolated regions.

We are obviously thinking about the social side of our platform so that it benefits as many people as possible. 

Your project has already received numerous international awards, have these recognitions enabled you to make your innovations a reality? 

In fact, these prices, with their financial envelopes, prove above all that what we are developing is really important and necessary. But it is also a motivation to continue our action. However, there is still a lot to do and we continue to look for partners and collaborators because innovating in the health sector in Africa is not always easy and manufacturing efficient and effective medical instruments is even more complicated. We have the chance to work on a system that is starting to prove its worth, we hope that its implementation will be sustainable and that it will serve as a basis and a development model for other telemedicine projects.  

The innovations developed by Conrad Tankou have received several awards.

Our inventor doctor was awarded the 1st Prize for Young African Innovators for Health, awarded in September 2021 by the International Federation of the Pharmaceutical Industry and Speak Up Africa.

For the moment, these devices are deployed in health centers in isolated regions of Cameroon.

But the goal of the start-up, looking for financial partners, is to establish itself, by 2025, in each country of sub-Saharan Africa.

If you have any questions or suggestions, you can write to us at

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