Screening Technology Built for the Last Mile

Why Smartphones, Why Africa, Why Now

Sub-Saharan Africa faces a critical gap between the number of people who need routine health screening and the equipment available to deliver it. Pulse oximeters break. Blood pressure cuffs require calibration. Supply chains stretch across months. Meanwhile, community health workers carry smartphones that are more computationally powerful than the medical devices they cannot access.

We asked a direct question: what if the phone itself could capture vital signs? Remote photoplethysmography — rPPG — uses the smartphone camera to detect subtle changes in facial skin colour caused by blood flow. From those signals, the software estimates heart rate, heart rate variability, respiratory rate, and stress indicators. No contact. No consumables. No additional hardware.

We did not build this in a laboratory and hope it would work in the field. We went to Uganda, partnered with community health programs, and put the technology in the hands of CHWs conducting real household visits in rural districts. We learned what works when the lighting is poor, the phone is entry-level, and there is no WiFi for fifty kilometres.

That field-first development approach shaped every design decision — offline-first architecture, one-hour training requirements, low-cost device compatibility, on-device processing for data sovereignty. CareHealthScan represents our commitment to making this technology available where the need is greatest and the infrastructure is most constrained.

Our Mission in Global Health

To eliminate equipment as a barrier to vital signs screening in low-resource health systems. Every community health worker with a smartphone should be able to capture basic vital signs during every household visit, every antenatal check, and every community screening event — without waiting for equipment that may never arrive. We partner with the organizations and ministries already doing this work and give them a tool that scales with their ambition.