Not deterred by an ongoing student strike for internship allowances, an innovators’ exhibition was held Friday Morning at Makerere University main hall during which a number of amazing innovations were displayed.
Among the innovations showcased was Visual+, an App made to help visually impaired smart phone users to have a better experience with their phones. Ahumuza Hezekiah, the Visual+ developer says with Visual+, a blind person can do with a smart phone all that until now has been a preserve of people with normal vision.
Ahumuza demonstrated how through audio commands and hand movements, the phone app can be used by a blind person to save a contact, play music and make a call among an array of other functionalities. All that a user has to do is to shake or swipe the phone in a particular direction or pattern to achieve their aim.
Perharps to dispel concerns that the purpose of the app may be defeated by people’s different accents, Ahumuza says the app is not affected by such since it takes note of the blind user’s accent and later executes commands given under the same accent.
At the same exhibition, Robert Kasozi also presented a health App called Taasa which eases access to first aid information. This App contains a step-by-step guide concerning which particular first aid should be administered under which conditions for example in case of a snake bite and many others.
Kasozi’s App also has features such as emergency hotlines for ambulances as well as google maps to help tell the user the location of the nearest hospital.
Wanji Godfrey and Ojara Peter, graduates with a master’s degree in engineering from Makerere University displayed a low-cost water pump that operates on solar energy. Wanji says the solar water pump is made from locally made materials and it is accessible by and affordable to farmers.
Ojara says that what sets their solar water pump apart from other pumps on the market is that their innovation is cheaper than all the others.
Other innovations on display included a community radio, ROOT|0, which is operated through a phone. The brain behind this project, Jude Mukundane, says he came up with the project to help local people in hard to reach areas to be able to control and operate their own radios.
He says he got the idea after realising that majority of people in rural areas depend on radios for information and yet the radio stations are very far from them and at times in languages they don’t understand.
The International Committee of the Red Cross, Makerere University and Resilient Africa Network organised the exhibition.
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