Citizens help monitor disease outbreaks in Kenya

Web platforms and mobile applications enable Kenyan citizens to report their health symptoms, helping the system identify potential disease outbreaks in specific areas. This solution was developed by Dr. Leah Mutanu Mwaura, Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Computing and Informatics at the United States International University – Africa.

Dr. Mutanu recently received the Top Ranked Female Researcher award from the Kenya Education Network (KENET), the national research and education network (NREN) of Kenya.

In addition to the platforms and applications for citizen reporting, self-adaptive solutions have been created. These solutions autonomously train themselves to select services that consume fewer resources, addressing the challenges of a resource-constrained environment.

Timely interventions

The award was given based on the number of scientific publications by Dr. Mutanu for the period 2018-2023. She covers a broad range of computing science areas including Software Engineering, Machine Learning, Internet-of-Things (IoT) technology, and Autonomic Computing with an emphasis on use of technology in health care, agriculture, and education. Among the applications are solutions for poor maternal and infant health, enhancing food security by addressing the issue of crop pests and livestock diseases, and enhancing academic performance in computer science education.

Besides the solutions for citizen reporting of symptoms, Dr. Mutanu’s contributions to health care include remote patient monitoring. Here the focus is on how the caregiver or doctor can monitor a patient when they are at different locations using IoT technology and health information exchange solutions.

According to the KENET website, these remote patient monitoring solutions have made timely interventions to improve healthcare outcomes possible.

Virtual lab supports research

As an Associate Professor, Dr. Mutanu has supervised graduates researching on managing information systems, software development and Machine Learning. She has also utilised the KENET Virtual Lab (VLab) for computing and storage services while conducting her research. The VLab is a virtual cloud environment that provides research ICT services to the Kenyan research community. The platform provides select pre-configured virtual appliances running software tracks such as statistical analysis, Quantum Espresso, NumPy/Scikit which can be deployed by demand. The VLab has been used for research and education purposes to provide seamless computing resources management. The platform is secure and isolated, and only accessible by approved users affiliated to KENET member institutions.

When asked what the future of Computer Science looks like, according to the KENET website, Dr. Mutanu noted the demand for computing skills and the need to adopt a multidisciplinary approach in computer science:

“There is a need to incorporate other disciplines in the training part to create more creators of technology rather than consumers of technology in the face of unique challenges,” she said

The text is inspired by the article “Dr. Leah Mutanu, USIU-Africa, Top Female Researcher in Computer Science according to Scival/Scopus” published on the KENET website.