Ebola-proof tablet designed by Google rolled out in Sierra Leone disease centre - Telegraph

MSF staff testing one of the Clinical Management Tablets at the Magburaka treatment centre in Sierra Leone

It was designed after a Medecins Sans Frontieres doctor working in the organisation’s treatment centre told his colleague in London he was being forced to shout patient details over a fence from inside the protective zone where medics must be fully covered to avoid catching the deadly disease, since even passing a piece of paper to the outside could risk transmitting it.

Sierra Leone said on March 19, 2015 it will confine around 2.5 million people to their homes across the capital and in the north in a three-day shutdown aimed at stemming the Ebola epidemic

“He was shouting through a mask at the end of his ward round to someone on the other side of the fence who was writing the notes down and then entering them in a patient record,” said Ivan Gayton, MSF’s technology adviser.

“It was error prone, exhausting and it wasted five or 10 minutes of the hour medics can spend fully dressed inside the protective zone before they collapse from heat exhaustion.”

Mr Gayton approached several contacts in technology, including one in Google’s Crisis Response Team. The company eventually assigned five engineers to work on a design and eight devices have now been distributed to medics at MSF’s treatment centre in Sierra Leone.

Health workers from Sierra Leone's Red Cross Society Burial Team 7 preparing to carry a corpse out of a house in Freetown

Although cases are now tailing off, Mr Gayton said the information stored on the devices will help map symptom patterns and the open-source technology could be deployed for other disease outbreaks.

“Hiccups are a very distinctive sign of Ebola but we haven’t known whether they were a good or bad sign,” he said. “Collecting more information increases our understanding of the disease which should increase our capacity to fight it.”

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