Innovation

A chronic R1 million idea

When necessity and brilliance come together, the results are often inspirational and very, very useful.

05 July 2016

Neo Hutiri is an engineer with a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering (UCT), a Masters in Engineering  (WITS) and a real love of technology. He also contracted tuberculosis. In January 2014, he was diagnosed with this chronic disease and spent six months regularly driving back and forth to his local clinic to get treatment and collect medicine. While he built up his health, he sat in queues. He noticed other patients sitting in queues. He realised how long people had to wait to simply pick up their medication.

And he had an idea… “I started to think about solutions that could be applied to this problem and that is where my journey started,” says Hutiri, founder of Technovera, the startup that recently won the #Hack.Jozi challenge, besting hundreds of hopefuls to take the impressive final prize of R1 million. “I wanted to find a way of reducing the time patients spent waiting to collect their medication,” says Hutiri. “This inspired me to create Technovera and a solution that uses technology to allow people with chronic medical conditions to collect their medications in minutes, not hours.”

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