Lifelens to Bring Malaria Treatment to the Masses with Windows Phone and Bing Maps

On Friday, four teams from around the world were informed that they had won a $75,000 grant to propel their Imagine Cup ideas and prototypes to the next level. One of the winners was Lifelens a distributed team that developed an innovative and cost effective way to identify malaria in patients living in remote and underserved areas.

Team Life Lens Image 2

Lifelens is a point-of-care tool to diagnose malaria using an augmented Windows Phone 7 application. A blood sample is applied to a slide with a dye that only malaria parasites can absorb. Using a special lens with 350x magnification, the Windows Phone takes an image of that slide to get a cellular-level view of the blood cells. The LifeLens technology then detects which cells are infected with malaria. The application includes GPS to geotag the location of each cellular analysis, which can then be displayed on Bing Maps.

Team Life Lens Image

Yesterday, Tristan Gibeau stopped by our offices to talk with Stefan Weitz about the project, what it was like winning the grant and how the team used Bing Maps. You can check out the conversation as well an overview of LifeLens in the team’s own words below:

– Ted Roduner, Bing