MIT Solve

Solution Overview

Solution Name

Evening Spark

One-line solution summary.

Evening Spark aims at helping patients with neurodegenetative diseases gain access to affordable and quality healthcare as well create awareness.

Elevator pitch

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What is your solution?

Awareness on neurodegenerative diseases as well as specialised quality healthcare for patients and people at risk of the same is required to help manage the cases and ensure good health for people especially the elderly across low-middle-income countries where on a daily basis, is limited.

SOLUTION STATEMENT

In order to tackle the outlined issues, we came up with “Evening Spark”. Evening Spark is a proposed e-health platform targeted at providing affordable services to tackle the healthcare needs of people with and at risk of neurodegenerative diseases.

WORKING STRATEGY

Evening Spark will be providing the following products and services through:

A website that will contain useful information on neurodegenerative diseases, its prevention and the services Evening Spark has to offer as regarding diagnosis, treatment and management, access to good quality and affordable medication.
Social media handles disseminating the information stated above with links to the website and app for further services.
The Evening Spark App that will facilitate the reception and provision of the Evening Spark Services.
Call lines for people with little or no access to the internet, to access our service
Periodic offline outreaches and awareness in public places to educate the public.

What specific problem are you trying to solve?

We are trying to solve the problem of ignorance about neurodegenetative diseases resulting in fetish superstitions and neglect of affected individuals. As well as, unaffordability and inaccessibility of good quality healthcare to cater for these patients especially in rural areas of LMICs using Nigeria as the first target community. Currently, there are no definite statistics of people affected by neurodegenetative disorders in the country but Aiyesimoju et al, 1984 in "Hereditary Neurodegenetative Diseases in Nigerian Africans" published by Neurology Journal, points to the fact that over 2.1 million patients had been recorded with neurodegenetative diseases at the University College Hospital, Ibadan in a period of 25 years. Hence, it will be safe to say that it is quite a burden with statistics of other areas within the country unknown.

Who does your solution serve? In what ways will the solution impact their lives?

The target population of our solution are people with neurodegenetative diseases particularly the elderly and most importantly, those with limited access to quality healthcare. Our solution, Evening Spark will not only create awareness of the existence of these diseases in our communities and ways of caring for loved ones, but also bring healthcare to the doorstep of affected individuals.

What steps have you taken to understand the needs of the population you want to serve?

I have seen first-hand the struggles of people with neurodegenetative diseases in semi-urban areas. First, a close friend's father being diagnosed of Parkinson's, next a neighbour few blocks from ours with Dementia. Having to interact with the caregiver and the other myself, I have been been to identify the problem and I believe our solution will successfully curb the problem identified.

Which aspects of the Challenge does your solution most closely address?

Improving healthcare access and health outcomes; and reducing and ultimately eliminating health disparities (Health)

Our solution's stage of development:

Concept: An idea being explored for its feasibility to build a product, service, or business model based on that idea

Explain why you selected this stage of development for your solution—in other words, what have you accomplished to date?

We selected "Concept" because it is an idea that is still being developed and we hope this will serve as a platform to launch it into reality.

Where our solution team is headquartered or located:

Uyo, Nigeria

Team Lead:

Esther Bassey

More About Your Solution

Which of the following categories best describes your solution?

A new use of an existing technology (e.g. application to a new problem or in a new location)

Describe the core technology that powers your solution.

With the inclusion of Artificial Intelligence in hands, we aim to mobilize an app based on technological facets regarding health concerns, as there are people unaware regarding, while suffering from, incredibly impacted diseases of Brain, and asunder from in-person guidance, the influence of virtual practices should be enhanced.

Owing to the aforementioned, we aim to make the app exist as a template for the suffered to do practices enhancing their health, and not merely providing information concerning the healthy practices and general initials, though help them get their pertinent queries answered by building the app in such a way that it can become able to provide the pertinent guidelines in accordance with the raised questions of the app users. As, major proportion of the world is not well equipped with the knowledge of thorough technology; therefore, it's part of our core purpose to make the app user friendly by equipping people with a simple existence of the app professing guideline, information, and if plausible; then, we will work on installing a self-made assistant to help with anything existing outside the spectrum.

Please select the technologies currently used in your solution:

Artificial Intelligence / Machine Learning
Crowd Sourced Service / Social Networks
Software and Mobile Applications

How many people does your solution currently serve, and how many do you plan to serve in the next year? If you haven’t yet launched your solution, tell us how many people you plan to serve in the next year.

We hope to serve at least a five hundred people in the next year after we have launched our solution.

What are your impact goals for the next year, and how will you achieve them?

Our impact goals are:

1. Create awareness on the existence of neurodegenetative diseases in our communities.

2. Provide affordable and quality healthcare to people with neurodegenetative diseases thereby helping extend their lifespan.

3. Educating rural communities on how to live healthy inorder to avoid risk factors of some of these diseases.

4. Provision of cognitive source reserve aid for dementia patients.

How are you measuring your progress or planning to measure your progress toward your impact goals?

We plan to measure our progress based on the following factors:

1. How many patients subscribe to our offers and successfully get help.

2. Our cash inflow and ability to pay staff satisfactory

3. The number of people successfully reached out to during our outreaches as well as number of communities covered.

What barriers currently exist for you to accomplish your goals in the next year?

The main barriers that currently exist are financial and religious barriers. Given availability of funds, we could kickstart our idea by first registering it legally, hiring needed staff members, carryout the outreaches we need to and making sure our vision is a reality. Religious barrier in the sense that already, neurodegenetative diseases are mostly perceived as "witch attacks" by most of our target audience in the communities. We anticipate some difficulties in convincing them the importance of quality medical help that we will be offering.

About Your Team

Your Business Model & Resources