If you watched television or used the internet at all last year, odds are you know at least a little about the West African Ebola epidemic. It was a ruthless outbreak that spread all the way to the United States and claimed an estimated 10,000 lives along the way. Doctors from around the world rallied to help stave off the spread of this deadly and notoriously difficult to treat disease, but encountered many roadblocks in their quest. Now thanks to the genius team at Google, one of those major roadblocks just got knocked down.

Ebola is rare, deadly and highly contagious. Since the Ebola virus can be passed through bodily fluids like saliva and mucus, as well as an infected patient’s sweat, medical staff treating the infected parties have to bundle up in several layers of protective gear in order to ensure they themselves do not become infected. Which brings us to the problem of patient charts – how can you keep track of patient data when anything you take into the hot zone becomes immediately contaminated? This obviously rules out the use of computers or tablets, and even paper and pen have to be destroyed once they’ve entered a contaminated zone. Doctors up to now have been working around this by shouting patient data over makeshift barricades to avoid spreading the contagion, but it is still highly inefficient. So Jay Achar, part of the French organization Medecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders) decided something had to be done. Someone at MSF reached out to Google for help and they responded with a whole new piece of technology: a tablet that allowed doctors to maintain patient charts and could be de-contaminated as needed.

The team at Google spent months developing the specialized Android tablet that would allow doctors to record medical info from inside a high-risk zone and transmit it wirelessly to battery-powered servers on the outside. The tablet itself has an industrial level polycarbonate waterproof casing that can withstand soaking in 0.5% chlorine solution, a substance strong enough to burn skin. Additionally, since any small hole or puncture to safety gear could prove hazardous to medical teams, the tablet has a rounded design with no sharp edges to it. The tablet can be charged quickly and wirelessly and connects to a tiny local network server no larger than the size of a quarter. While doctors are testing the device currently at MSF treatment centers in Sierra Leone, Google is working to open source the project so that the system could one day be used to battle other epidemics as well as aid in medical research in underdeveloped areas.