Health experts in laboratories globally have tried their best to devise ways to end the largest Ebola epidemic on record. Now, technology experts have also been coming up with new ways to attack the virus with the help of smartphones and Ebola-proof tablets.

Since the outbreak started in December 2013, recording and tracking of the victims of Ebola in the West African nations of Sierra Leone, Guinea and Liberia has proved a major challenge. It spread rapidly, killing over 11,000 people.

Ivan Gayton, an emergency coordinator with the medical charity Medicins Sans Frontieres (MSF), said that inefficient tracking was not helpful, with workers in treatment centers that shared information about patients by shouting it over a fence to colleagues in a low-risk zone to record by hand.

Workers knew that it was not just bodily fluids that could spread the disease but also contaminated paper and clipboards. This thought triggered the idea of an Ebola-free tablet.

So, Gayton decided to collaborate with a Dutch developer Pim De Witte, founder of a technology company called Whitespell, for creating an Ebola-proof tablet aided by funding from Google.

An off-the-shelf device has a polycarbonate shell that will make it waterproof and chlorine resistant and is charged wirelessly so it does not need to taken in and out of contamination zones.

Workers punch in data related to patients, which can be stored, tracked and analyzed externally. The interface is optimized for that people who wear steamy goggles and thick plastic gloves.

All the software, including the design for the shell made by 3D printing, is an open source. This means that anyone can download and improve it. One can store the data on the tablet when there is no signal, and can upload it later.

Gayton told the Thomson Reuters Foundation, “It's actually really complicated to make it simple”.