Cultivating Young Minds for Digital Health Innovations in Ghana

About George Boateng

George Boateng is a computer scientist, engineer, and educator from Ghana. He is a PhD Candidate at ETH Zurich, Switzerland, where he is developing a smartwatch-based machine learning model for multimodal emotion recognition among romantic couples for diabetes management. He is the President and Cofounder of Nsesa Foundation, an educational nonprofit whose vision is to spur an “Innovation Revolution” in Africa.

About the Lecture

This summer, George ran Project iSWEST 2019, his organization’s 6th annual 3-week intensive innovation bootcamp for high school and university students in Ghana. This year’s theme centered on developing technologies to address issues in Ghana’s healthcare sector and received sponsorship from ETH Zurich’s Center for Digital Health Interventions. Over the course of 3 weeks, 25 students (52% female) were given hands-on training in Programming, Arduino and Innovation. Five teams of students then developed prototypes of technologies addressing various healthcare issues such as lack of enough blood at the blood banks and ineffective communication between deaf patients and health workers. They presented and demoed their solutions to a panel of judges and the public at our pitch day event. In this lecture, he will talk about their unique programming and innovation curriculum, their teaching and mentoring approach, the outcomes and various lessons learned which could be applicable to developing innovations to address healthcare issues in different parts of the world.