Healthy Blood Sample
Enter Cy Khormaee, a Harvard Business School student, and his team at Lifelens. According to their website, “Lifelens introduces an innovative point-of-care smartphone application to address child mortality rates caused by the lack of detection and availability of treatment for malaria.”
The Lifelens system is made up of a hardware element and a software one. The specific hardware in the system is a microscopy lens that is attached to the back of Windows 7 mobile device. The software application, which is developed in Silverlight, can visualize samples placed on the lens as if it were a micrscope.
Using the system is relatively simple. A single drop of blood from the patient is required then smeared on the microscopy lens. Next, the application visualizes the blood sample at a higher maginification (like a micrscope). The application’s user simply has to know the difference between a healthy blood sample and one infected with malaria at high magnification, which is quite easy when looking at the images below, although the software is capable of analyzing the sample computationally as well.
Healthy Blood Sample
Malaria-infected Blood Sample