In a continent where malaria kills thousands of people yearly, this is a laudable achievement!

Four Ugandan students have developed a mobile phone app to diagnose malaria without the use of needles.

The students Brian Gitta, Joshua Businge, Simon Lubambo and Josiah Kavuma, known as team Code 8, were announced the winners of the inaugural Women’s Empowerment Award at Microsoft’s global student software competition, Imagine Cup in St Petersburg, Russia last month. Their app is called ‘Matibabu‘, a Swahili word for medical centre.

Their rapid diagnostic test can be done anywhere and without a qualified microscopist. It usually takes about 15 minutes to get the results, though it cannot show the number of parasites as a microscopic diagnosis does.

Matibabu uses a custom-made portable device called a matiscope, which is connected to a smartphone, to do a rapid diagnostic test. The user’s finger is inserted into the matiscope, and the application uses a red light to penetrate the skin and detect the red blood cells.

The hardware has a light-emitting diode and a light sensor, and it transmits the test results to the user’s phone for processing.

Matibabu then sends the results to the Microsoft file hosting service, Skydrive, and these can be shared with the patient’s doctor almost immediately, preventing the long delay in getting results.

According to one of the developers, 21 year-old Brian, he has had malaria too many times to count. And over the years, because of the numerous times he has had to have his blood drawn to test for the disease, he has developed a fear of needles.

“I was two or three years old when I first contracted it,” he tells IPS. “It’s very unusual to meet people in Uganda who haven’t had malaria. If you go to a clinic, you might find that 90 percent of patients have it.”

After his most recent bout of malaria in 2012 where he was bedridden for days, he imagined a “mobile medical centre” that offered a quicker and pain-free diagnosis without needles and pricks.

Code 8 says that Matibabu, which can currently only be used with the Windows phone operating system, will help pregnant women in particular. According to the World Health Organisation, half the world’s population is susceptible to malaria. Pregnant women, young children and people living with HIV/AIDS are especially vulnerable.

“When a pregnant woman gets malaria it affects the baby,” Lubambo tells IPS. “But if it’s able to be detected very early it could reduce miscarriages.”

The team hopes to have Android and other OS versions by mid-2014. They say when they begin introducing other versions for different platforms, they may start using file hosting services, like Dropbox, to store the results.


http://greenbiro.com/ugandan-students-develop-app-for-conducting-malaria-tests-without-needles-matibabu/

Good. Me self want to develop app for checking HIV n pregnancy without seeing the doctor, only my hopes would get me there.

9ja students, where una dey

Dat 1 gud now, bt make them develope d 1 weh go attract girls to me. Pls I beg of u (haha c English).