Social Entrepreneurship Award: How to fight against malaria through crowdsourcing

The researcher of the Moncloa Campus Miguel Luenzo-Oroz was appointed as a Social Entrepreneur by the Ashoka foundation thanks to his MalariaSpot project which applies the crowdsourcing for medical diagnosis.

17/02/2014

The researcher of the Moncloa Campus Miguel Luenzo-Oroz was appointed as a Social Entrepreneur by the Ashoka foundation thanks to his MalariaSpot project which applies the crowdsourcing for medical diagnosis.

The MalariaSpot videogame and its latest version of Malaria Hunter for iPhone and iPad allow the malaria diagnosis.

Today, combating the malaria by clicks from a computer o mobile phone is possible. The idea is to combine video games, medical imaging and crowdsourcing to make accessible the malaria diagnosis over the world. This innovative approach is the basis of MalariaSpot, a project developed by Miguel Luengo Oroz, who develops his work along with the Group of Biomedical Imaging Technology of the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid within the framework of Moncloa Campus through the International Programme for Attracting Talent (PICATA).

The Ashoka foundation has recognised his project as “social entrepreneurship”, this initiative of the prestigious foundation supports leaders on social innovation in different fields. The selection process to assign new entrepreneurs is long and rigorous.

The MalariaSpot videogame is available on the web and it has also a mobile phone application (Malaria Hunter). The basic idea is to combine the clicks of various non-expert volunteers that are playing on the same image. Therefore, we can obtain a parasite count of high accuracy. Merging the obtained results by 22 volunteers with no prior experience or 13 trained volunteers during a minute can achieve a perfect count of parasites, explained the Dr. Luengo-Oroz. “Millions of hours a day are spent on playing videogames worldwide, mainly by young people. A very small percentage of this time would be sufficient to diagnosis all the malaria cases in the world”. Malaria is the most serious threat in global health. It is responsible for over a million of deaths and there are 200 millions of cases every year.

Tag: i-Health    Source: CEI Campus Moncloa

Event date:

17/02/2014