Smartphone Image Processing to Assess Childhood Malnutrition

Heba Khamis of the University of New South Wales in Australia will use smartphone technology to more accurately measure malnutrition in children from developing countries, which puts them at increased risk of death from diseases such as pneumonia. They will develop an image-processing algorithm for calculating three key growth parameters (height, and arm and head circumference) and thereby assessing nutritional status from a photograph of a child taken by a smartphone. They will recruit twenty children to help refine the algorithm and the protocol for taking the photograph, which will then be validated on an independent set of children.