Students have created a mobile software for diagnosing malaria in a blood sample.

Technologies are moving forward, various areas are developing, and there are very interesting hybrid solutions that are at the interface, for example, mobile technologies and medicine. So, a team of students led by Tristan Gibo from the University of Central Florida created a mobile phone application that can diagnose malaria.

Work on this project, called Team LifeLens, has been going on since November 2010, and the mobile application for Windows Phone 7 is now ready (the developers used the Samsung Focus phone). I don’t know, frankly, whether blood samples are photographed using optics, or just a drop of blood and a mobile phone are used, but the application still knows how to distinguish a blood sample with malaria pathogens from “pure” blood.
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According to the WHO, about 800 thousand people die from malaria every year, of which about 90% of deaths belong to the southern regions of Africa. The developers claim that the application does not require a connection to the Web, only a mobile phone, the application itself, and glass slides with a blood sample. This is all that is needed for analysis, which usually takes much more time and requires the use of additional equipment.

The application, although it works, has some problems, so the LifeLens project did not get first place in the Imagine Cup competition from Microsoft (the fact that the organizer of the competition is Microsoft explains the use of Windows 7 as a mobile platform).

In general, the details are not so much, but the project, apparently, is really interesting. Not so long ago, I remind you, scientists from Harvard have created a practical and cheap system for the early detection of cancer .

More such projects, good and necessary.

Via CNET