Overview
Cardiovascular disease is the leading cause of death worldwide, and across sub-Saharan Africa non-communicable diseases are rising rapidly and projected to overtake infectious diseases as the leading cause of death by 2030. Yet access to cardiac diagnostics across the continent remains severely limited. In Kenya, fewer than 6% of health facilities have specialised cardiac diagnostic equipment, and only around 35 cardiologists serve a population of more than 50 million people. For millions of patients, life-saving diagnosis remains out of reach.
Founded by medical doctor Alice Muhuhu, MoyoECG addresses this gap with a portable ECG platform built specifically for low-resource settings. The device enables frontline healthcare workers in rural clinics to screen patients and receive rapid diagnostic support, even in facilities without reliable electricity or internet connectivity.
Clinical pilots have demonstrated strong diagnostic sensitivity and specificity for arrhythmia and cardiac anomaly detection, while reducing interpretation time from around 30 minutes to under five. The device can also capture signals associated with conditions such as myocardial ischaemia, conduction abnormalities, electrolyte disturbances and other structural or electrical heart disorders.
The challenge
Recognition from the Africa Prize shows that breakthrough medical innovation can rise from Africa. Because no life should be lost simply because diagnosis came too late. Every heartbeat matters.
Alice Muhuhu’s motivation is deeply personal. Growing up in Nairobi, she experienced the devastating consequences of delayed medical care after losing her father following a road accident. That loss exposed her early to how fragile life can be when timely treatment is unavailable.
Years later, while training as a medical doctor at one of Africa’s largest public hospitals, she witnessed similar delays on a much wider scale. Patients frequently arrived with advanced disease simply because diagnosis had come too late.
During her medical education, Alice trained across several countries, including Kenya, Poland, Grenada, Egypt and South Africa. Experiencing medicine in very different healthcare systems revealed how strongly access to diagnostic technology shapes outcomes, often determining whether patients receive care early enough to prevent serious complications.
While training in Poland, she saw how technology could support proactive care when a woman arrived at the hospital after receiving an alert that she was at high risk of arrhythmia. Back in Kenya during the COVID-19 pandemic, Alice saw the opposite: patients missing follow-up appointments, and arriving critically ill when it was already too late for early intervention. The contrast made clear how often healthcare in Kenya remained reactive rather than preventive.
Kenya’s healthcare system remains heavily centralised, with specialist services concentrated in major cities. Rural clinics often lack ECG equipment entirely, and where machines exist, interpretation depends on scarce cardiologists. Late diagnosis of cardiac conditions can lead to stroke, heart failure and preventable deaths. Maternal cardiac complications, an often overlooked contributor to maternal mortality, also frequently go undetected.
The innovation
Determined to address these challenges, Alice founded Aurora Health Systems to develop medical technologies tailored to the realities of healthcare delivery in Africa.
The result is MoyoECG, a wearable device designed to expand access to cardiac screening in low-resource environments. The device captures electrical signals from the heart from multiple angles and helps healthcare providers detect abnormal heart rhythms and other cardiac conditions earlier.
“Moyo” means “heart” in Swahili, reflecting the mission behind the technology: bringing life-saving cardiac care closer to the communities that need it most.
The platform uses embedded artificial intelligence to assist healthcare workers in interpreting cardiac signals more quickly, helping identify high-risk patients who require urgent referral for specialist care.
Designed for real-world conditions, the technology enables cardiac screening to take place directly at the point of care, even in clinics where connectivity and infrastructure are limited. The device can operate without reliable internet connectivity or stable electricity, allowing diagnostic services to reach communities that previously had little or no access to cardiac testing.
Video transcript
My inspiration came from my medical training in over six countries. I realised that there was a huge inadequacy of vital tools in under-resourced facilities and rural facilities. So I decided that I can be able to apply myself beyond clinical medicine.
At Aurora, our goal is to increase access to specialised cardiac care across Africa. We have developed a wireless electrocardiogram device that captures the electrical signals of the heart, capturing up to 35 different heart conditions. It is designed to work in low resource settings, in areas with intermittent internet or electrical connection. In addition, we have paired this with a software that offers artificial intelligence recommendations to clinicians.
Winning the Africa Prize, it would mean that I would represent women in STEM in the sub-Saharan region who are vastly underrepresented. It would also assist our company to get the validation to scale in other countries.
The impact
MoyoECG primarily serves rural and lower-tier health facilities where access to ECG diagnostics is minimal. Clinical pilots have demonstrated strong diagnostic performance while significantly reducing the time required for cardiac interpretation by frontline healthcare workers. The work has been recognised by the Kenya Cardiac Society and published in the Cardiovascular Journal of Africa (CVJA).
The innovation has also received international recognition, including being named Top African Winner by Qualcomm in 2024 and winning the HealthTech Hub Africa Innovation Challenge. The project has attracted support from organisations including the Novartis Foundation, the Global Fund and Standard Chartered Bank.
Beyond improving access to diagnosis, the platform is also contributing to the development of one of the largest ECG datasets from African populations, helping address global disparities in medical data and improving the accuracy of future diagnostic tools.
With support from the Africa Prize, the team aims to secure regulatory approvals, strengthen intellectual property protection, refine its AI pipeline and scale deployment beyond East Africa. Aurora Health Systems also plans to expand from its current network to more than 200 facilities, while continuing to develop new applications for maternal and neonatal cardiac monitoring.
For Alice, the mission goes beyond building a device. It is about proving that world-class medical innovation can emerge from Africa and be designed for the realities of the communities it serves.
