For the thousands of families in Thailand who have to hire nurses to take care of bedridden family members, the cost of healthcare is staggering. While the average monthly household income is 22,400 Baht, the cost of at-home care can range from 10,000 to 30,000 Baht a month. This means that, in some cases, the price of taking care of sick or elderly relatives can entirely exceed a family's total salary.
In addition to the financial stress, families also have to spend hours a day worrying about their loved ones, attending to their medical needs, and coordinating with busy nurses. These burdens can lead to feelings of increased stress, debilitating burnout, and persistent exhaustion for caretakers.
As a lifelong innovator, Paeto Wangweera—a high school student who lived in Thailand and moved to the United States—did not shy away from tackling these massive problems in healthcare.
Instead, he committed himself to learning biotechnology in school and invented Carecamera, a medical device that eliminates the need for bedridden patients to receive 24/7 care from nurses. Carecamera is a software system for remotely monitoring patient vitals. If there are any medical issues, it triggers an alarm that alerts relevant family members and nurses to immediately assist the patient.
During the designing process, Paeto was careful to address the privacy concerns of patients. To ensure that patients feel comfortable with Carecamera's presence, Paeto intentionally limited the video capabilities of the device to only turn on once a medical emergency is detected.
To test the product, Paeto partnered with nurses and visited patient homes to validate whether or not Carecamera could effectively communicate patient vitals. His experiments were successful; Carecamera produced an accurate picture of the patient's medical state. While Carecamera was not as efficient at vital sign monitoring as the current leaders in healthcare, Paeto is committed to improving his product and increasing Carecamera's international presence.
As an acknowledgement of its innovative functionality, Carecamera has received the Top 10 Invention Award at the iCAN International Invention Innovation Competition in Canada and a gold medal at the World Invention Creativity Olympic in Korea.
Although Carecamera has achieved competitive success, Paeto wants his invention to be a standard part of at-home medical care so it can alleviate the financial and physical burdens of homecare for hundreds of thousands of families across Thailand. Currently, Paeto is working to incorporate Carecamera in senior centers to provide immediate relief to families and overworked nurses.
Paeto envisions Carecamera as an internally recognized household name. In college, Paeto plans to broaden the design of Carecamera to fit the demands and structures of the American healthcare system while pursuing research in computational biology and gene editing techniques.
Even though Carecamera has the potential to make a global impact, Paeto has not forgotten where he learned the foundations for his work. He attributes his success with Carecamera to the opportunities that he had to learn and research biotechnology at his high school. Without these academic resources, Paeto notes that it is nearly impossible to acquire the background knowledge necessary to pursue biotechnological inventions. He hopes that the continued success of Carecamera inspires more educational opportunities for newer generations to enter into the field.
Whether Paeto is advocating for increased accessibility into the biotech market or introducing new engineering designs in the medical industry, he approaches his work with the belief that everyone deserves quality healthcare. Carecamera—along with Paeto and his vision for the future of biotechnology—are poised to make waves in the healthcare system.
