Charles Onu is the creator of Ubenwa, an artificial intelligence system that analyses a baby’s cry to give warning signs of bay asphyxia which is the
Charles Onu is the creator of Ubenwa, an artificial intelligence system that analyses a baby’s cry to give warning signs of bay asphyxia which is the third leading killer of infants worldwide. Charles Onu and his team created a machine learning system called ‘Ubenwa’, an Igbo word which means the cry of a child and it has the ability to take as input, the cry of a baby, analyse the amplitude and frequency patterns in the cry, to give instant diagnosis of birth asphyxia. According to reports, 95% accuracy has been achieved in trials involving over 1,400 pre-recorded baby cries.
“The detection of baby birth asphyxia takes 10 seconds with the Ubenwa application. It is faster compared to blood test based detection. Compared to the current method using a blood gas analyser, Ubenwa is non-invasive requiring only cry rather than blood, low-cost (about 95% cheaper than clinical alternative), and requires little or no skill to operate,” says Charles Onu.
Ubenwa will help parents to monitor and better care for their children, while also providing health institutions especially in developing countries with an effective, low-cost alternative.
