Joshua Adewolu chose to build for medical doctors, instead of becoming one

Most people who grew up with doctor parents either follow the medical path or reject it entirely. Joshua Adewolu did neither. Raised in Benin City, the Edo State capital,  southern Nigeria, with an elder brother who studied medicine, he spent his childhood as the one person in the house who could not keep up with the medical conversations. 

“I was the odd one out, not understanding what was being communicated,” Adewolu says. 

For a while, the path seemed obvious: medicine. But in 2009, his interests shifted. 

“I told my parents that I would rather be the one to make the devices that you use to treat people,” he recalls. “That was the beginning of my career”.

He completed his secondary education in 2013, and in the same year, enrolled at Afe Babalola University (ABUAD), a private university in Ekiti State. He chose to study Mechatronics Engineering, a multidisciplinary field combining mechanical, electrical, and computer engineering. 

“There were only two universities in Nigeria that were offering the course— Afe Babalola University and one other university,” he says.

Real systems, real stakes 

In 2016, in his third year as a student, Adewolu secured a three-month internship, the student work experience program (SWEP), which was a mandatory part of his program. He interned at Sidmach Technologies, a Nigerian IT-solutions company that was in charge of designing the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) portal.  

“I was working on some of the screens and the user interface,” Adewolu recalls. “That was my first real tech role.” At Sidmach, he learnt more about programming languages such as Java and C#.

His next internship demanded something different entirely—not screens and interfaces, but physical systems, buildings, and the infrastructure that keeps them running. 

In 2017, during his fourth year in the university, he undertook a six-month student industrial work experience scheme (SIWES), a mandatory program designed to bridge the gap between classroom theory and practical workplace skills. He said he interned at Chrema Technologies, a Lagos-based firm specialising in building automation and security systems. At Chrema, the work was hands-on in a way that textbooks and lecture notes in schools rarely are. 

“I remember I was part of a team of three that was responsible for installing a smart access control technology in Reckitt Benckiser [a consumer goods company],” Adewolu says. “I was also involved in the installation of building management technologies at Guaranty Trust Bank, which had a contract with Chrema Technologies to install some building management systems like thermometers”.

On one installation at Reckitt Benckiser, he recalls his team spent an entire day troubleshooting fingerprint scanners that had faults, and eventually resolved the issue that night. “It really showed me perseverance on the job,” he says.

Apart from learning perseverance, Adewolu overcame his dislike for heights at Chrema. 

He says he was assigned with some colleagues to install CCTV cameras at a hangar at the domestic wing of Murtala Muhammed Airport in Lagos. 

“I needed to get on a cherry picker to go all the way to the roof of the hangar to install the cameras,” he says. “It was very nerve-wracking at first, but after two times I got used to it.”

Thanks to both internships, he came to understand the structure of a large organisation and the hunger of a smaller one. The experience, he says,  gave him a sense of how the real world of engineering actually runs. 

“At Sidmach, I only knew what was happening in my division and didn’t really have close relationships with the senior leadership. At Chrema, I got to know how the whole organisation was doing,” Adewolu recounts.

After completing the internships, Adewolu returned home to Edo State in 2017. Back at his father’s Life Hospital, he watched doctors press Pinard horns—trumpet-shaped tubes—against the bellies of pregnant women, counting foetal heartbeats the old-fashioned way, by ear and by patience. 

“We are now in the gadget world,” he says. “I was determined that I was going to innovate this process.” 

He then started building. 

Adewolu started his undergraduate research on an Internet of Things (IoT) device for foetal heart rate monitoring, which was supervised by one of his lecturers in school.

“With all the knowledge I gained from studying mechatronics, I designed a device,” he recalls.

In 2018, he developed a prototype of the device. The handheld tool read a foetus’s heartbeat and transmitted the data and visual graphs to the cloud, allowing authorised medical personnel to monitor clinical data remotely.

“I got all the knowledge from Sidmach [when] designing web portals,” he admits.

According to Adewolu, the device was tested on five women at Life Hospital. He would go on to publish his findings in a co-authored 2022 research paper, “Performance Evaluation of an IoT-Based Fetal Heart Monitoring Device.” 

Upon completing his bachelor’s degree in 2018, Adewolu was named the best graduating student in both the Mechatronics Engineering program and the Department of Mechanical and Mechatronics Engineering.

Building far from home 

By 2019, Adewolu’s academic record as best graduating student earned him a scholarship from the Stephen Oluwole Awokoya Foundation for Science Education, a Nigerian non-profit providing support for the postgraduate education of students with a record of academic excellence in the sciences. 

The scholarship funded his Master’s programme in Mechatronics and Robotics at New York University (NYU), a private research university in the United States. At NYU, he specialised in medical robotics and assistive mechatronics.

Then the COVID-19 pandemic arrived, and with it, a new obsession. The world was suddenly hyper-aware of coughs: of its presence, its absence, and what it sounded like. That collective anxiety translated into a research question: what if a device could learn to read a cough? Not just detect it, but classify it—distinguish a respiratory infection from the reflex of an irritated throat.

He built a smart neckband that sat against the throat and listened, not to sound exactly, but to vibration. 

“It was a sole project under the supervision of one of the NYU professors that had taught me,” Adewolu explains. 

Graduation in 2021 brought a different kind of problem to solve: building a career in a country he had only recently arrived in. He landed at Siemens Mobility,  a transport company, working as a Technical Support Engineer. He managed customer relationships, a skill he admits he honed during his internship at Chrema. He also diagnosed faults in railway vehicles, keeping transport infrastructure running across the US. 

After four years at Siemens, Adewolu returned to Nigeria. Not to rest, but to build. 

The devices are just getting started 

By the time Adewolu came home in October 2025, he says he shifted his focus back to academia, reviewing articles for international engineering publications such as the International Journal of Mechatronics, Robotics, and Artificial Intelligence (IJMRAI). He says he has also worked as an engineering consultant, training Artificial Intelligence (AI) models as a subject matter expert in mechanical and electrical systems.

He remains vocal about the state of his field in Nigeria, saying  “mechatronics is still at an early stage,” which fuels his desire to continue innovating within the country.

He is currently working on a management system for the elderly. The goal, he says, is a system that monitors “when they’ve left secure areas, or tracks their medication intake.” 

It is, in many ways, the same instinct that drove him to the Pinard horn,  a gap between what care looks like in practice and what technology already makes possible. 

Besides projects, Adewolu is also interested in publishing his research and contributing to Academia. The cough detection research he had begun at NYU during the pandemic had continued maturing in the years since; in early 2026, the paper was accepted by SoutheastCon, a premier engineering conference in the US, and he presented it in March. 

The engineer’s five-year vision is characteristically concrete: a medical device, shaped by his research, used in hospitals and care facilities around the world. Not a prototype or a conference paper. A real tool, in real hands, helping real patients. 

“I see myself building a startup or working in a biotech company. It can even be both,” Adewolu notes.

Outside research and building devices, Adewolu loves to read and finds inspiration in success stories. A personal favourite is Gifted Hands, the autobiography of Ben Carson, a renowned American neurosurgeon. 

He is also currently enrolled in a project management course, PMP Certification Exam Prep Course, on Udemy, to refine his ability to lead complex engineering ventures. 

“[I am] learning something new, and just adding value to myself,” he concludes.