Kato Hussein Wabbi is tackling a major gap in global health care. In sub-Saharan African countries, 70 per cent of critical medical equipment is broken at any given time.

“That means seven out of 10 important pieces of technology are not working when patients come into a hospital. It’s a crisis. It means too many people are not getting the care they need,” says Kato, a native of Uganda who is working toward his doctorate in biomedical engineering at Western University.  

An example? Specialized refrigerators essential for safely storing vaccines frequently fail, rendering life-saving doses unusable.

“Vaccines are very sensitive to temperature,” says Kato. “They must be refrigerated between two and eight degrees Celsius. Any deviation in the temperature causes damage to the vaccines that is irreversible.”

Without vaccines to fight diseases like malaria, measles and yellow fever, he adds, people die.  

The problem extends to a vast range of equipment. Kato saw the evidence when he was an undergrad at Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda’s capital city.  

“I did my internship in a hospital and I witnessed a huge amount of medical equipment sitting in what we call the equipment graveyards or pushed into hospital corners, waiting for repairs that take weeks, sometimes months. And this is life-saving equipment.”

There are a number of reasons for the equipment not working and taking so long to get fixed, he says.  

“Maintenance is a big issue, which is usually reactive in low-resourced settings like sub-Saharan Africa. The equipment is repaired after it breaks down. And we often don’t have spare parts in-country. They have to be imported and the procurement supply chain takes months.”

The solution, he says, is to adopt a maintenance plan: predict and, therefore, prevent equipment breakdown, which is how technology is maintained at major institutions in countries like Canada.  

And to do that, Kato and his colleagues are developing an edge AI-powered solution.

“We want to implement a device that can be retrofitted on a piece of medical equipment and is able to read the different signals from the equipment, such as vibrations, temperature and power consumption. Once the device learns the patterns, when a deviation occurs, it will be able to tell a failure is about to happen. And it doesn't just send an alarm that something is failing, it explains the problem and sends a notification to technicians. And they can be ahead of the breakdown and order the parts.”

Under the supervision of medical biophysics professors David Holdsworth and Maria Drangova, Kato is pursuing his work through Frugal Biomedical Innovations, an interdisciplinary program in Western’s School of Biomedical Engineering. The program is the first of its kind in Canada.  

He says his research team is injecting the concept of frugality into their predictive maintenance plan. “It’s not frugality in that it’s of low quality, but frugal in being able to achieve something that is low cost and at the same time effective in low-income countries and underserved communities in high-income countries.”

Kato has long been passionate about saving lives.  

“When I was growing up, I wanted to be a medical doctor, but when I applied to universities, they offered me biomedical engineering. I talked with the head of biomedical engineering at Makerere University, Robert Ssekitoleko, and he told me, ‘You can still save lives with medical equipment.’ So that’s the goal that has kept motivating me.”

And as Kato points out, medical expertise is only as good as the tools we have to put it into practice.  

“Even if we have well-trained doctors in hospitals, lives will be lost if the equipment is not doing what it's supposed to.”

Once he's finished his doctoral studies, Kato hopes to ensure his technology reaches resource-limited health-care settings around the world, starting with Uganda, where his family lives, but extending to every community where life-saving equipment is failing.

“I want to train more biomedical engineers so we can solve the problems in our countries ourselves and not have to wait for others to solve them. And I don't want our research to just sit in academic journals. I want to see it having an impact where it’s needed.”