Inventors hope mobile technology will have a huge impact on how the disease is treated, reports BILL CORCORANin Cape Town

RESEARCHERS BASED in the US have developed a mobile phone application that can diagnose whether someone has been infected with malaria, a disease that kills up to one million people each year, the majority of whom are children under five.

The technological development by newly formed research group Lifelens could have a huge impact on malaria treatment in the difficult-to-reach rural parts of the world that are plagued by mosquitoes, which carry the disease.

In a video and article available on its website, Lifelens says it “hopes to directly address the major problem of reducing child mortality rates throughout the world by providing a robust mobile diagnostic solution for malaria patients.

“The premise of the Lifelens project is to digitally characterise anemia, visualise blood cell rupture and parasites, and provide three-dimensional modelling of cells through single image acquisition of low-volume blood smears by peripheral finger pricks.”

In sub-Saharan Africa, one of the world’s worst malaria affected areas, the current method of detection, the rapid diagnostic test (RDT), is known to give false positive results up to 60 per cent of the time.

The RDT method uses a cotton swab and a reactive agent that is mixed with a drop of blood. When the agent comes into contact with malaria-infected blood, the malarial antibodies change the colour of the cotton.

However, the reactive agent is unstable and can change colour for a number of different reasons unconnected with malaria. This leads to a massive waste of antimalarial medicines, and promotes resistance to them, in areas where malaria is common.

Lifelens says tests it has carried out so far show a 94.4 per cent accuracy rate when applying its technology to images and blood samples provided by different labs.

In simple terms, Lifelens has replaced the unreliable cotton swab with a high-definition, high-magnification camera, equipped with image analysis software to improve the accuracy of the diagnosis. Its software is designed for use on the Windows Phone 7 OS.

The diagnostic process consists of a number of steps, according to the Lifelens research group, which is made up of a graduate from the University of Florida and four university students from around the US.

Firstly, blood is drawn from a person and placed on a slide to create a smear that can be digitally analysed. The smear is imaged, and then diagnosed using the Lifelens application that has been downloaded to the phone. Once the diagnosis has been made, it is texted back to the phone user.

A person with the minimum amount of training can diagnose themselves within minutes, says the group on its website.

“With such a straightforward process, Lifelens can be used by anyone who has the ability to operate basic cell phones,” claims the research group.

“This opens up the possibilities of even shipping devices directly to afflicted areas as no special training or language skills are necessary for the operation of the device.”

Lifelens adds: “In this way we seek to offer lower cost care to a much broader spectrum of the world’s population than what can currently be served by blood analysis labs or rapid diagnostic tests.”

Although mobile phones are widely used across Africa, most people have yet to upgrade to the newer smartphone models needed to run the Lifelens application due to their high cost.

However, health professionals working in the field in many of the world’s poorest countries could benefit hugely from the new technology.

Earlier this month, the Lifelens project came third at Microsoft’s Imagine Cup 2011, a worldwide competition that gives students a chance to demonstrate new and unique technology that has the potential to change the world.

The group hopes to secure funding to further develop its technology in the near future.