In a country of more than 24 million people with fewer than 50 cardiologists, heart disease accounts for 12 percent of all deaths in Cameroon. For decades, rural patients faced a grim choice: undertake expensive, often dangerous journeys to urban specialists, or go undiagnosed. Arthur Zang, a computer engineer from Mbankomo, near Yaoundé, set out to change that equation entirely.
From Rejection to Reinvention
Born in 1987, Zang grew up dreaming of becoming a doctor. When medical school rejected his application, he pivoted to computer science at the École Nationale Supérieure Polytechnique in Yaoundé. The redirection proved decisive. During a 2009 internship at the General Hospital of Yaoundé under cardiologist Professor Samuel Kingue, he encountered firsthand the catastrophic shortage of cardiac specialists across Central Africa. Rural patients, he learned, were not simply inconvenienced by the lack of local care — they were dying because of it. The death of his uncle from a stroke while he was still developing his prototype added a deeply personal dimension to his mission. "That pushed me to finish the device," Zang later said.
The Cardiopad: Africa's First Medical Tablet
Launched in 2016, the Cardiopad is a handheld touchscreen tablet that enables non-specialist healthcare workers in remote villages to perform electrocardiograms. Electrodes are placed on the patient and connected to the device, which digitises the heart signal and transmits it via a 3G mobile network to a cardiologist in a major city. A diagnosis can be returned to the remote site within 20 minutes. Zang taught himself the electronics required to build the tablet's hardware through online courses from the Indian Institute of Technology, supplementing his formal computer science training. Priced at approximately 3,000 US dollars — comparatively low for hospital-grade diagnostic equipment — the Cardiopad was designed from the outset with affordability in mind. Recognising that many smaller health facilities still could not meet that cost, Zang launched a distribution programme in 2017 under which devices are provided free of charge, with patients paying a modest annual fee for access to remote diagnosis from their own communities.
Building a Medical Technology Enterprise
In 2014, Zang founded Himore Medical Equipment to manufacture the Cardiopad and develop additional low-cost medical devices for underserved markets. By 2021, the Cardiopad was in active use in nearly 270 public health institutions across Cameroon, and had been deployed in Gabon, India, and Nepal. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Himore Medical Equipment developed the Oxynnet, a medical oxygen generator capable of producing 95 percent pure oxygen from ambient air and supporting up to ten patients simultaneously — a critical intervention in health systems where oxygen supply chains routinely collapse under pressure. "Poor people face many difficult problems in hospital," Zang has said. "I wanted to help them get better care, wherever they live."
International Recognition
Zang's work has earned him some of the most prestigious awards in global engineering and enterprise. In 2014, he was named a Young Laureate of the Rolex Award for Enterprise in the Applied Technology category. Two years later, the UK's Royal Academy of Engineering awarded him the gold medal of the Africa Prize for Engineering Innovation, along with a prize of 25,000 pounds sterling. TIME Magazine subsequently featured him as one of its Next Generation Leaders, recognising pioneers shaping the future of their respective fields. At 30 — the age at which TIME first profiled him — Zang had already demonstrated that the most consequential solutions to Africa's health crises could emerge from within the continent itself, built by engineers who understood the terrain, the constraints, and the human cost of the status quo.
