Traditional healer teaches AI app to recognise medicinal plants

Combining a passion for computer science and a calling to become a healer, Onke Simandla has used his IT skills and knowledge of traditional medicine to create an app with a wide range of uses.

- By Estelle Ellis

It took patience and time, but information technology (IT) systems specialist and traditional healer Onke Simandla has successfully designed an app for herbalists by teaching artificial intelligence (AI) to look for and recognise medicinal plants.

Simandla (42) received his master's degree in IT from the University of Fort Hare, Eastern Cape, this week. For him, it marked a significant milestone in his efforts to merge the worlds of computer science and traditional healing in his home province.

While doing his master's degree, Simandla also completed a short course in plant medicine and performed at the Makhanda Arts Festival, all while holding down a full-time job in the Department of Rural Development and Land Reform in Pretoria.

As he was doing his research, he was approached by the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, which sponsored a trip to China for him.

"The aim was to go and learn the health system with the view of coming back and starting to implement some of the things we learned," Simandla said. He explained that patients at public hospitals in China have access to both traditional Chinese and Western medicine.

The trip has set him on the path to his next goal of establishing a public health system in South Africa in which patients can be offered traditional healing as well as Western medicine in the same facility.