Lifelens: Windows Based Application Can Detect Malaria!

Bio medical engineering is helping doctors all around the world to take quicker steps for corrective and preventive action after diagnosing an ailment with the help of state of the art engineering tools. We have heard how iPhone has helped in saving peoples’ lives from extremely adverse situations and when all hopes were lost. An application called Lifelens has been developed by a student from Harvard Business School that will make the detection of Malaria more accurate and fast.

Cy Khormaee, student of Harvard Business School, developed the application in #-Link-Snipped-#. Silverlight comes free, and is a good application enabling various mobile, business applications along with interactive media experience. It is compatible with Windows, Mac and Linux working seamlessly on all major browsers (Firefox, Google Chrome, Safari and IE). This application works in accord with a special lens attached to the camera of a Windows smart phone to produce the results of Malaria detection tests in very short duration of time.



Malaria accounts for almost 85% of fatalities of children fewer than 5 years. The magnitude of this deadly disease in child mortality is alarming and WHO is hell bent on reducing these statistics. Presently, the procedure adopted to detect Malaria is relatively cumbersome and does not give 100% accurate results every time. The “Rapid Diagnostic Test” will give different results for the blood samples, as the reactive agent used is highly unstable. Sometimes this reactive agent will give positive results for infections other than malaria. Hence, doctors rely both on this test and on their actual observations for symptoms in a patient to diagnose a person with Malaria. This can put the medical machinery in developing countries in jeopardy as the exact number of patients affected with malaria remains ambiguous. In addition, the faulty RTD test can result in wastage of Malaria medicines. If a patient undergoes medicinal dosage for Malaria even if he has healthy, he is in danger of reducing his resistance forartemisinin-based combination treatment.

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Lifelens promises to reduce the ambiguity of the RTD test and give results that are more accurate to doctors. The doctors can then decide whether to prescribe medication for Malaria or go for further tests. Lifelens is simple and integrates the hardware of a phone and the Silverlight software in a Windows phone. If the doctor wants to test the blood samples of a patient for Malaria, he has to apply it on a specially developed lens. This lens acts as a microscope and is to be attached to the camera’s lens. So you what you are eventually doing is putting one lens on top of the other. This magnifies the blood cells and the detection of malarial parasites becomes simple. The application then uses this image to analyze the blood sample and gives its diagnosis, based on which the doctor can decide the future course of his action. The application provides 3D modeling of the sample cells.

The lens can be sterilized and used for multiple tests. This makes Lifelens truly life saving as it is cheap, simple and has a good possibility of widespread application in remote areas where the scarcity of skilled doctors is a major problem. Smart phones are coming to the rescue of doctors in developing countries in more innovative ways. It is now possible to detect Cataract in early stage with a smart phone. Read: #-Link-Snipped-#. Lifelens project is a finalist in #-Link-Snipped-#, contest designed by Microsoft. The contest encourages young people to “Imagine a world where technology helps solve the toughest problems.”

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