A mobile game allows the first collaborative remote diagnosis of malaria – PanamaOn

Mosquito Operation Purple is the name of a campaign that has made it possible to analyze medical images remotely collectively by non-experts. This test, which has been made possible thanks to MalariaSpot project of the Polytechnic University of Madrid (UPM) and the Ashoka Foundation, has been a success. In less than 15 minutes a clinic Mozambique has received the results of image analysis of samples of malaria by people playing with MalariaSpot mobile app.

From Mozambique

Testing was performed from the Health Research Centre in Manhiça (Mozambique), an institution that works closely with the Institute for Global Health of Barcelona. From there, using a mobile phone attached to a microscope, researchers have photographed specimens from patients with symptoms of malaria.

The images are uploaded to the game on the internet for people from anywhere in the world to play with them. Almost immediately, dozens of players summoned by social networks analyze images, allowing to have the results back in Mozambique in minutes. The online platform is hosted on the cloud infrastructure of Amazon Web Services.

This pilot project is the culmination of three years of work developing a pioneering idea which has mobilized more than 30,000 players in one hundred countries and has attracted the recognition of institutions like MIT, the City of Ideas in Mexico, the Singularity University at NASA or the Office of Science and Technology of the White House.

This is a simple game which goal is to find images parasites that cause malaria

“We have implemented a prototype of an idea and a technology with the potential to democratize access to diagnostic medical imaging. But we are at a critical moment and we need sponsors and investors for this project to go ahead in Spain, “explains Miguel Luengo Oroz, a researcher responsible for MalariaSpot.

Also with other diseases

The project is expanding the idea to other diseases such as tuberculosis and designing low-cost microscopes from mobile phones to clinically validate this pilot.

The MalariaSpot application can be downloaded from the mobile. This is a simple game whose objective is to find the images to the parasites that cause malaria. How to help players diagnosis? The key is collective intelligence: how a person can go wrong, the application combines the views of several players to get as reliable as the result of a specialist

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