SHARJAH 19 April 2019: Students have come up with several unique but simple inventions and detection tools that can identify cancer symptoms.
These range from a bed that can measure a child’s weight loss and fever, a binocular or similar microscopic devise that can inspect a white-eye pupil, an emotion evaluation system that detects fluctuations in the moods of young cancer patients, a robot to take care of a patient’s medicinal needs, to a scratch sensor-enabled camera by that will keep a tab on a child’s vitals and report to doctor and parents.
The exercise was part of Friends of Cancer Patients (FOCP)’s youth awareness initiative – the annual Ana-vation School Championship, which seeks to educate UAE’s school-goers about common signs of paediatric cancers and empower them to come up with realistic DIY solutions to detect these signs and help young cancer patients.
FOCP distributed Ana-vation’s DIY robotic kits to 150 students to create devices, using their knowledge of Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Mathematics, that can tackle the seven major symptoms of paediatric cancers.
Ana, an Arabic word which means ‘I’ in English, is a childhood cancer initiative that falls under Friends of Cancer Patients’ umbrella “Kashf” for early detection of cancer. Ana seeks to raise awareness about the seven common warning signs of childhood cancer and highlight the importance of early detection, as childhood cancer is the fourth most common cause of death among children under 15 years old in industrialised nations, according to World Health Organisation (WHO) statistics.
FOCP was established to help alleviate the financial and emotional burden that cancer often imposes on patients and their families, and to promote awareness about the six early detectable forms of the disease; breast cancer, cervical cancer, prostate cancer, skin cancer, testicular cancer and colorectal cancer. Since being founded in 1999, FOCP has provided support to more than 5,000 cancer patients of all ages and nationalities across the UAE.
