HBS Student Creates Smartphone App To Detect Malaria!

Although the disease is all but gone from Europe and North America, malaria is a blood-borne parasite that still causes millions of deaths around the globe every year. The disease doesn’t discriminate, but hits children in underdeveloped countries and regions like sub-Saharan Africa especially hard. To combat the problem, one student at Harvard Business School looked to a tool he already had in his pocket: his smartphone.

Cy Khormaee, a student at the Harvard Business School, decided that there had to be a better way to quickly diagnose malaria and treat people before the disease wound up killing them.

The current most-often used malaria test is called the RDT (Rapid Diagnostic Test) where a cotton swab is dipped in a solution that reacts when exposed to blood with antigens created by the malaria parasite. The subject’s finger is pricked, the swab is applied, and you wait to see what happens. Unfortunately, the RDT only has a 40% accuracy rate, and often doctors in the field will use expensive malaria medicine to treat people who have symptoms but whose RDT turned up negative.

Khormaee’s test takes a different approach. He wrote his app, called Lifelens, in Silverlight for Windows Phone 7, and along with the software is a microscopy lens that’s attached to the camera of the Windows Phone. A doctor in the field would then prick the subject’s finger, smear a drop of the subject’s blood on the microscopy lens, and then turn the phone over and fire up the app.

Lifelens allows a user to see the blood sample as if it were under a powerful microscope, which makes it easy to identify the malaria parasite in the subject’s blood sample. That’s all there is to it: you have a lens that can be quickly sterilized and re-used for another patient, or multiple lenses that can attach to the same phone, and caregivers in the field can determine with great accuracy whether a subject is infected with malaria, saving time, money, and lives.

The Lifelens tream is hoping to take home the Imagine Cup from the Imagine Cup World Finals, a contest sponsored by Microsoft that challenges inventors and students to use technology to solve some of the world’s more difficult problems.

A Healthy Blood Sample