Here’s a cool idea – a team of University of Central Florida students is working on a smart phone application that will help healthcare workers in remote locations diagnose malaria quickly and easily. Using a smart-phone equipped with Windows 7 and a microscopic camera lens, the app will take pictures of a blood sample, identify and point out malaria parasites, and tell the user how much malaria is in the blood. Because it doesn’t use the internet, the application could be especially useful for a healthcare worker in a remote location without Internet access, such as an African village. The data can be uploaded later, however, to help identify disease trends.
