Arthur Zang is a Cameroonian IT specialist and inventor of Cardio Pad, Africa’s first computer tablet to diagnose people with heart disease.
In 2014, experts made it known that cardiovascular diseases are the second largest cause of death in the country of Cameroon. Cameroon, a country in Central Africa, has a population of over 26 million people as of 2020. But for all these people and the whole country of Cameroon, there were just only 50 cardiologists and were all based in two principal cities of the country.
This shortage of cardiologists made it hard for many people in rural Cameroon to have access to quality heart disease treatments, which of course increased the deaths of the people in the country in a greater volume. To curb this from further occurrence, Arthur Zang, an IT expert from Cameroon has developed a tablet called cardio pad. The device allows healthcare workers in rural areas to perform cardiac tests and send results to specialists via a mobile phone connection.
With this device, heart examinations can be performed in any part of the country of Cameroon and the exams will be sent to a cardiologist in the city who then sends a report containing the results and the suggested medical treatment. With the help of the cardio pad, many Cameroonians have been diagnosed and got proper heart treatments. This invention has earned Arthur many recognitions both home and abroad and of course, won some Funding Programs on the international level (where Forbes magazine described him as “an example of African innovation at its finest”), as well as the Royal Academy of Engineering in London.
Arthur Zang launched the Himore Medical company in 2012 due to this ingenious discovery. Following the release of the Cardio-Pad, he established the first cardiac insurance for low-income people. Africa Cardiac Care is a yearly subscription-based health programme that costs less than $60 per year. Himore Medical, where Arthur Zang works full-time as chief executive officer and project manager, is supporting the programme, which has already impacted over 1,600 people in Cameroon.
Reports also have it that many cardio pads have been sold in countries like Gabon, Nepal and even India. It is effortless for you to conclude that the invention of Arthur is changing the face of Africa on a global scale, but if you also think deeply, you will observe that Arthur Zang is not just helping his country and Africa but the world at large. And I think calling him a real-life superhero is not bad, because that’s what explains his actions of saving lives.