Description
Malaria is one of the most serious threats to global health. Currently, the standard way to diagnose this disease (with over 200 million cases of malaria per year and killing half a million people) is to count the number of parasites in blood samples using a microscope. A process that can take up to 30 minutes. And there are not enough specialists in the world to diagnose all cases of malaria.
MalariaSpot is a project that wants to solve this problem with citizen participation. We turn the diagnostic process into a video game and investigate techniques to combine player results in order to obtain a reliable result. The first research was with MalariaSpot in 2012. We applied the idea to Tuberculosis in 2014 with the game TuberSpot. And now we are launching MalariaSpot Bubbles to try to differentiate between different species of parasites. MalariaSpot belongs to the social enterprise Spotlab.
After the launch of MalariaSpot, anonymous volunteers from 95 different countries played more than 12,000 games that resulted in a database of 270,000 clicks on parasite images. The analysis of these data revealed that the fusion of the results obtained by 22 volunteers with no previous experience or 13 volunteers trained for one minute allows to obtain a perfect parasite count, as accurate as that of an expert microscopist.
Scientific publications
Crowdsourcing Malaria Parasite Quantification: An Online Game for Analyzing Images of Infected Thick Blood Smears , Journal of Medical Internet Research 2012;14(6):e167 - M. Luengo-Oroz, A. Arranz, J. Frean
Gamers join real-life fight against malaria and tuberculosis, The Lancet Infectious Diseases , Volume 16 , Issue 4 , 418 - L. Albers
The power of crowds, Science, 01 Jan 2016: 32-33 - P Michelucci, J. L. Dickinson
Recognition and Awards
In 2015 he received the Social Innovation Award from the MIT Technology Review in Spanish and the Lego Foundation named him one of the 10 most innovative educational projects. Miguel Luengo Oroz, founder of the project, was named a social entrepreneur by Ashoka Foundation in 2013. In addition, the project has been awarded by MIT and Madrid with the MVISION Idea2 Award to promote innovation in biomedical technology. In March 2013, the project was a finalist in the Rockefeller Foundation Next Century Innovators Awards for innovations that aim to solve deep-rooted social problems and promote lasting change in systems affecting vulnerable people.
Aim
MalariaSpot is a project that wants to solve, with citizen participation, the current difficulties for diagnosing all the malaria cases, due to the insufficient number of specialists in the world. We turn the diagnostic process into a video game and investigate techniques to combine player results in order to obtain a reliable result. The first research was with MalariaSpot in 2012. We applied the idea to Tuberculosis in 2014 with the game TuberSpot. And now we are launching MalariaSpot Bubbles to try to differentiate between different species of parasites. MalariaSpot belongs to the social enterprise Spotlab.
After the launch of MalariaSpot, anonymous volunteers from 95 different countries played more than 12,000 games that resulted in a database of 270,000 clicks on parasite images. The analysis of these data revealed that the fusion of the results obtained by 22 volunteers with no previous experience or 13 volunteers trained for one minute allows to obtain a perfect parasite count, as accurate as that of an expert microscopist.
How to participate
None
Equipment
Only the app (both mobile phone and computer)