Africa innovates Magazine -AI4DEV - Flipbook - Page 24
AFRICA INNOVATES
EBTSAM HUSSIEN SALEH & TESFALEM BELAY YOHANNES
ADAPTABLE APP
WITH DISABLED
PEOPLE IN MIND
T E S - I T : C OV I D - 1 9 AWA R E N E S S A P P
With modest resources, computer engineer and tech enthusiast Ebtsam
Hussien Saleh, 26, and her colleague 38-year-old Tesfalem Belay Yohannes,
are using their skills to respond to COVID-19 in a very unique way.
For Ebtsam, her hobby and passion about tech and cyber
space, while studying at university, evolved and soon
became full-time work. And it wasn’t long before she joined
forces with her colleague, Tesfalem, who studied physics
and web development. The pair co-founded their startup TES IT Service, in Asmara. When COVID-19 hit, they
combined their skills to develop a user-friendly COVID-19
mobile app that overcomes constrained internet access by
using SMS and offline mapping, to facilitate information
awareness about the deadly virus.
ANDROID-BASED
The Android-based COVID-19 awareness app, which has
futuristic potential in most of its functionalities, provides
information on the pandemic, including on prevention,
symptoms, self-care and contact tracing.
Also unique to this app is that it is multilingual, and the
pair have also even incorporated sign language. It is also
easily adaptable, and accommodates visual, audio and
video formats. “Our COVID-19 mobile app has a great impact on our society given that it’s a multi-language app
and the target group of the app are every citizen from
young to old and people with disabilities (the blind and
the deaf). Since information and prevention measures
should be everyone’s responsibility, we tried to make our
app as entertaining and educational as possible,” says
24 SHOWCASING AFRICAN INNOVATION
Ebtsam and Tesfalem.
“When the disease first emerged our first thoughts
were on how to contribute our knowledge to meet the few
drawbacks we have in our society. Creating awareness
about the prevention methods was a challenge. That’s
when we came up with an idea to develop the COVID-19
awareness mobile application,” they state, adding:
“Technology, especially smart phones, impacts everyone’s lives. And providing accurate information through
a mobile phone allows everyone to know. This realisation
inspired us to develop this product.”
LO O K I N G TO T H E F U T U R E
“In the future versions of the application we have
plans, to include tracing of people who have been in contact with an infected person. We also plan to upgrade our
app for different kinds of diseases mainly affecting our
society, working with the health sector of our country.”
Ebtsam and Tesfalem’s deployment of digital platforms
that are easily accessible to the population for community outreach to increase public knowledge on the pandemic, strengthen preventive measures to save lives and
maintain the population’s physical and mental health
is now among the critical tools in Eritrea’s frontline fight
against COVID-19.
The application complements the existing communica-
