A team of graduate students have combined technology with medicine, instilling in the modern smartphones a function that serves the cause of treating and extinguishing malaria. The youth in discussion have more precisely designed an application which will enable healthcare workers in remote locations to give an immediate diagnose of the mosquito-borne infectious disease.

The malaria diagnosing application is still in the developmental stage and it will have the chance of being materialized if it wins this weekend’s Imagine Cup 2011 national finals in Seattle. The earlier mentioned competition is a project call sponsored by Microsoft which addresses students who consider that can “imagine a world where technology helps solve the toughest problems.”

Referring to this entry requirement, Tristan Gibeau, 25, a graduate computer engineering student at the University of Central Florida in Orlando and leader of the anti malaria application team, confidently affirmed their work meet the conditions. In capacity of the project’s software designer, Mr Gibeau described it as follows: “It’s going to make a difference in trying to contain the outbreak of malaria. In the big picture, it’ll hopefully help in the fight against most diseases out there and make everybody’s life a little easier.”

The prototype used by his team is a Windows 7-equipped Samsung Focus smart phone modified with a microscopic camera lens. Its mechanism of diagnosing malaria resides in taking a picture of a blood sample, processing the data in order to identify malaria parasites, determining how much malaria is in the sample and then pointing the parasites out to the phone user. Describing in a more detailed manner the last stage of diagnosis, Gibeau said: “It actually draws a red box around the clusters of malaria, and it actually notifies you how many it found.”

Although smartphones already feature microscopic lenses as a component, the students’ software are extending their usefulness by allowing a doctor or nurse working, for example, in an African village lacking Internet access to give a diagnosis with no need of uploading data to be processed elsewhere. After the information is stored in the phone, it is uploaded and can be employed to spot disease trends, explained Gibeau.

Starting from an idea of team member Wilson To, a 25-year-old graduate student in comparative pathology at the University of California at Davis, the smartphone application motivated the group to develop other similar functions which would be useful in the case of other illnesses.