Here’s a cool idea – a team of University of Central Florida students is working on a smart phone application that will help healthcare workers in remote locations diagnose malaria quickly and easily. Using a smart-phone equipped with Windows 7 and a microscopic camera lens, the app will take pictures of a blood sample, identify and point out malaria parasites, and tell the user how much malaria is in the blood. Because it doesn’t use the internet, the application could be especially useful for a healthcare worker in a remote location without Internet access, such as an African village. The data can be uploaded later, however, to help identify disease trends.
If the UCF team’s malaria app were widely used, it could significantly reduce the roughly 880,000 yearly deaths from malaria. Seeing the impact it could have, UCF students entered the software into Microsoft’s prestigious Imagine Cup competition and ended up winning 2nd place. But the team isn’t stopping there—they are also hoping to create more apps to diagnose other diseases.
Further, the concept of using mobile apps to perform diagnoses isn’t brand new; in fact, it’s a healthcare trend that has recently been picking up some serious steam. For example, UCLA researchers have been working on an iPhone application that will use the device’s accelerometer to diagnose a Parkinson’s disease tremor. There is even an app in the works, from Star Analytical Services, that hopes to diagnose disease based on the sound of a cough, picked up by your cell’s microphone. While these apps may not be game-changers on the level of remote location malaria diagnosis, they do point toward a bright future of useful and accessible mobile healthcare technology.
What do you think? Is app-based diagnosis the future of medicine?