Who’s 17 years old and smarter than you? Catharine Wong, a brilliant girl who invented an electrocardiogram (EKG) for something everyone carries in their front pocket, a cell phone.
Stemming from the idea of telemedicine, Wong queried, why not build a EKG with a Bluetooth cellular signal when access to the Internet, and even toilets, is less available in developing countries than cellular networks? Telemedicine has been most commonly thought of as using computers and WiFi to connect doctors to patients remotely. However, most developing first-world countries in need of such medical innovations do not have the funds, computers, or Internet infrastructure for the idea to work.
Wong developed four different prototypes for the tiny heart monitor and explained her hypothesis and ideas to Cogito.org in the video below.