Beyond that, I'm not sure if the patent is absurd or not...but I definitely don't think its absurd for a 19 year old woman to write up and be awarded a patent.
A 19 year old, no matter how smart, is not likely to have a thorough enough background to understand all of the related technologies involved in this patent. This is a medical device, and has to be "done right", or people can be injured or worse. I don't expect even a top-tier CS student could pull it off.
I'm not attempting to discredit her intelligence, just pointing out she seems to have been/is an "idea guy". We've all run into "idea guys", they'll pitch a great idea with all this elaborate stuff, but then can't execute on it without outside help. Perhaps she got help, who knows?
A patent is, more-or-less, a mere idea (which is absurd in it's own right, ideas should not be patentable imho). So, you are right, it's not "absurd for a 19 year old [gender-is-regardless] to write up and be awarded a patent", it's absurd it was patentable in the first place.
That doesn't detract from her intelligence, but I think it's safe to say she would have simply done it herself if she could have.
I think simply describing her as an "idea person" is also missing the mark, but so are you. She isn't a magician, she's just a person.
And considering she was 19 and in a normal college curriculum, it's very likely her talent is not in being super smart, but in being able to come at a problem sideways.
By the age of 14 or 15, most intelligent and motivated people have enough education to start learning advanced processes and systems. Say you start at 14, if you are focussed, by the time you are 19, you will have had 12,000+ hours of opportunity to develop expertise in your field. And Ms. Holmes sounds very capable (Learned Mandarin in her spare time as a teenager, as a result spent a summer at the Genome Institute in Singapore,etc, etc,...)
I would expect that there is a significant (if not excessively large) population of 19 year olds out there that can not only invent, and understand, but also design, and prototype advanced technological platforms of the same complexity identified in this patent.
We had a 13 year old in my Computing Science Undergraduate course at SFU who just absorbed and aced every math course he encountered, zero effort at homework or note taking.
Some people are capable of great accomplishments at a very young age, and strictly speaking, 19 is not particularly young.
Actually, that anecdote made it evident that the reporter clearly didn't do his research. If he had, he would have known that one of Singapore's draws since its inception has been its English fluency. This is particularly true in its white collar/STEM companies and research institutes.
Moreover, many of Singapore's ethnic Chinese are non-native Mandarin speakers, being of Southern Chinese descent. They would almost certainly feel more comfortable conversing in English than in Mandarin, particularly if they are highly educated.
Written English is hit and miss, but spoken english is definitely the Universal common language for business in Singapore.