Field Study of Malaria Laboratory Testing Using Mobile Telephones

Every minute a child somewhere in the world dies of malaria; and 90% of these deaths occur in Africa. Currently there is a big gap in the availability of high quality malaria diagnosis, especially at community level in African countries. In partnership with Mobile Malaria Labs (Momala), Amref Health Africa will close this gap. We will increase the capacity of peripheral laboratories and improve the accuracy in diagnosing malaria, subsequently improving appropriate treatment and drastically reducing over-consumption of anti-malarial medicines. We believe that high quality diagnosis is achievable in low-resource environments in African countries. We will introduce a novel, affordable, easy to use and reliable method of diagnosing malaria based on microscopy - which remains the accepted standard - and the use of a mobile phone device incorporating a specially designed application. We turn a smartphone into a malaria diagnostic expert. The app makes use of a proprietary algorithm which is able to diagnose malaria from a microscopic image of a blood film with >98% accuracy, making it as good as expert microscopy. By applying this algorithm, the process of microscopy will be performed more rapidly and more reliably to the level of expert microscopy. We request funding for field testing the app in the African context (Homa Bay and Kwale Counties, Kenya). Ministries of Health and other stakeholders in these areas are already involved and ready to scale up after the field test.