Nigerian Engineer Builds Smart Medical Devices for Doctors

Joshua Adewolu spent his childhood feeling left out of dinner table conversations at his family's hospital in Benin City, Nigeria. While his doctor parents and brother discussed medical cases, he sat quietly, unable to follow along.

But in 2009, something clicked. Instead of following his family into medicine, the teenager made a bold announcement: he would build the devices doctors use to treat patients.

That promise launched him into mechatronics engineering, a field combining mechanical, electrical, and computer systems. He enrolled at Afe Babalola University in 2013, one of only two Nigerian schools offering the program at the time.

His internships brought classroom theory to life in dramatic ways. At Sidmach Technologies, he worked on screens for Nigeria's national university admissions portal. At Chrema Technologies, he spent an entire day troubleshooting faulty fingerprint scanners at a major company, finally solving the problem late that night.

The work also cured his fear of heights. Installing security cameras at Lagos airport required riding a cherry picker to the top of an aircraft hangar. After two trips up, his nerves settled.

Back home at his father's Life Hospital in 2017, Adewolu watched doctors press old-fashioned trumpet-shaped tubes against pregnant women's bellies to count fetal heartbeats manually. He knew technology could do better.

He spent months designing a handheld device that reads fetal heartbeats and sends the data to the cloud. Doctors could then monitor their patients remotely through visual graphs and real-time updates. Five women at Life Hospital tested the prototype successfully.

His innovation and academic excellence earned him recognition as the best graduating student in his engineering program in 2018. That achievement unlocked a scholarship to study medical robotics at New York University.

At NYU during the COVID-19 pandemic, Adewolu tackled a new challenge: teaching devices to classify different types of coughs. His work explores how technology can detect respiratory conditions by analyzing sound patterns.

The Ripple Effect

Adewolu's journey shows how one person's decision to follow their passion instead of family expectations can create tools that help thousands. His fetal monitoring device brings modern healthcare technology to Nigerian hospitals, where many still rely on 19th-century equipment.

The devices he dreamed of building as a teenager are now helping the doctors he grew up admiring.