External Funded Project

Dr. Kizito Nkurikiyeyezu

Project Investigator: Dr. Kizito Nkurikiyeyezu
PI Profile Dr Kizito Nkurikiyeyezu works at the University of Rwanda’s Centre of Excellence in Biomedical Engineering and e-Health and a lecturer at the Africa Center of Excellence in Internet of Things. He completed his Ph.D. (Engineering, Intelligence & information) in 2020 at Aoyama Gakuin University, Tokyo, Japan. He received a master’s degree in Electrical & Computer Engineering and a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering from Oklahoma Christian University, OK, the USA in 2012 and 2011 respectively. He was an invited researcher at Aoyama Gakuin University in Japan and an invited scholar at the Université Jean Monnet in France. His research focusses on applied Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the context of healthcare.
Title of the project: Infectious Diseases Outbreak Prediction using Geolocation Data with Machine Learning
Type of the project: Postdoc/research award , cooperability, academia-industry, etc cooperability
Partners: LocationMind, Inc
Team members: Dr. Louis Sibomana, Dr. Ma.ssa Mbaye, Dr. Emmanuel Masabo, Dr. Didacienne Mukanyirigira , Batran Mohamed
Project amount: 50,000$
Funder: Icipe
Project period:
Short description of the project: This project proposes to leverage the ubiquitous mobile payment systems in order to collect location data to be used to detect infectious diseases in their early stage and to help decisionmakers take adequate countermeasures to prevent their spread. The proposed approach hinges on the possibility of estimating the geographic location of each mobile payment transaction and the identification of the customer/user. Such data, together with live data of infection test results, allows the development of models that enable the detection of infectious diseases before they spread widely and can be used to identify clusters of infected people and estimate the disease’s super-spreading potential. The proposed approach is low-cost, pragmatic, and is applicable to the context of developing countries.
Project status: Ongoing
Type of the Project: National or International : International