The platform allowed game developers to tap into the popular hobby of gaming apps, used by over a billion people every day, to help diagnose malaria.
new game - Malariaspot – developed by students from the Technological Institute of Madrid (UPM), uses the collective intelligence of players from around the world to help diagnose the viral disease that kills thousands of people every day.
Malaria is a viral disease transmitted by the bite of the Anopheles mosquito. About 438,000 deaths were caused in the world, 90% of them in Africa, and 214 million new cases of malaria were discovered worldwide.
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), the death rate from malaria has decreased by 60% since 2000. Rapid diagnosis of the disease contributes greatly to preventing deaths from the disease.
The technological platform on which the game is based, the Auto Scaling solution that grows according to the need, of the cloud computing giant AWS, provided the game developers with a flexible and fast interface, which is available anywhere around the world, thus avoiding network loads that are usually created when using large volumes of the Internet or on social networks. The platform allowed game developers to tap into the popular hobby of gaming apps, used by over a billion people every day, to help diagnose malaria.
"The process of counting malaria parasites in a blood sample manually is difficult and cumbersome and takes about 30 minutes. Unfortunately, there are not enough experts to diagnose the malaria cases in view of their large number," said Miguel Luango Oroz, one of the developers of the game, who during his work at the United Nations was exposed to the problematic manual counting. This is how the game was bornMalariaspot, which is now available for computers and smartphones, and aims to identify as many malaria parasites as possible in a real digital blood sample within one minute. The development team collaborates with a diagnostic clinic in Mozambique, and a number of tests conducted in real time succeeded in producing a collective malaria diagnosis mechanism, the first of its kind on the African continent.
Miguel and his team use in the AWS Research Grants Program which allows students, teachers, and researchers to move their activities to the cloud and thus operate with innovation, speed and low cost. "Today's children are technological by birth. They are used to analyzing digital images that include a lot of information," said Miguel, who emphasized the educational benefits that may arise from raising awareness of the use of games for science research.
"Malariaspot arouses a lot of interest even among children who are usually less interested in biology subjects, and shows that the future of medical diagnoses does not necessarily reside only in laboratories," stated Miguel. With the help of the game, the research team aims to reduce the diagnostic costs of global diseases, and raise awareness of them around the world. Miguel and his team of researchers estimate that within five years, 5% of computer games will be used to analyze medical diagnoses, with the help of games like Malariaspot and its "younger sister" Tubersoft, which uses the same interface for diagnosing tuberculosis.
Since the game was developed, more than 100,000 people in more than 100 countries have "hunted" one and a half million parasites, thereby helping to detect the presence of the malaria virus in blood samples. By combining the clicks made by several participants through an artificial intelligence interface, a diagnosis identical to that of an expert is obtained, but in a faster manner. In addition, the game was greatly appreciated by many institutions and organizations such as MIT, which marked the game's developer, Miguel Luango Oroz, as one of the ten Spaniards under the age of 35 who have the potential to change the world with technology. In addition, the unique project was evaluated on behalf of the NASA Research Center, and on behalf of the Office of Science and Technology of the White House.
