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Writer's pictureGerminal G. Van

Nvidia is expecting to disrupt the Nigerian healthcare market with AI


Nvidia is today one of the most valuable companies of the moment. It is, indeed, valued at $1 trillion as of May 30, 2023, as investors piled into the chipmaker that has quickly become one of the biggest winners of the AI boom. The stock’s value has tripled in less than eight months, reflecting the surge in interest in artificial intelligence following rapid advances in generative AI, which can engage in human-like conversation and craft everything from jokes to poetry.

But the chipmaker company isn’t limited to the American and European markets. It is also interested in expanding into emerging, especially the African market as a way to make artificial intelligence, the new instrument that Africans can accommodate themselves with. The use of artificial intelligence is essentially beneficial in industries such as healthcare.

A Nigerian medical doctor, Tobi Olatunji, who is a machine-learning scientist, sought to revolutionize the healthcare market in Nigeria by incorporating artificial intelligence to facilitate health-related activities for doctors, health professionals, and patients. Thus, the Nigerian doctor has partnered with Nvidia to make this revolution a reality. Tobi Olatunji obtained his master’s degree in medical informatics from the University of San Francisco and another in computer science at Georgia Tech. He started working as a machine-learning scientist in the United States by day, and writing code on nights and weekends to help digitize Africa’s hospitals.

In explaining the reasoning for building AI models, he said: “The combination of medical technology and thick African accents produced horrible results with most existing speech-to-text software, so we knew there would be no shortcut to training our own models.” Olatunji knew his models would need high-quality audio data. Thus the company created an app to capture sound bites of medical terms spoken in different accents. To date, the app’s gathered more than a million clips from more than 7,000 people across 24 countries, including 13 African nations. It is, indeed, one of the largest datasets of its type, parts of which have been released as open-source to support African speech research.

This partnership with Olatunji is a massive opportunity for Nvidia is become one of the first AI companies to have a stronghold in Africa and to expand the use of artificial intelligence in African markets. Indeed, Nvidia is convinced that better public health can help countries track real-time COVID infection rates, detect hotspots and target their response efforts. And beyond issues related to the post-pandemic era, strengthening data systems will allow local experts to connect population statistics to agricultural data, climate trends, and economic indicators.

The use of artificial intelligence is inevitable. It is a matter of time before African markets are forced to adapt to the reality of the digitized world. By partnering with Nvidia, Olatunji is positioning himself not only as a pathbreaking entrepreneur but as a disruptor of industry. The incorporation of AI in the healthcare market is set to completely disrupt the healthcare industry, not just in Nigeria but in the entire African continent.

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