Emerging Markets Today

Uganda: How Smartphones Are Helping Malaria Testing

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Episode notes

Did you know that malaria kills over 400,000 people per year globally?

This episode will be about how a project in Uganda is reaching underserved areas where testing for malaria can be challenging and having the diagnosis early can be a matter of life or death.

So I invited not one but 3 guests to talk about the project. In the first part of the episode I spoke to Professor Jon Cooper and Julien Reboud from the Bioengineering school at the University of Glasgow - we talked about how the project came about - the technology behind the testing - cleverly named origami testing because it is based on folded sheets of waxed paper. Also, how smartphones are used as a power source providing electricity to process the test.

You can see the test in action in this link.

(30:36) In the second part, I spoke to Lito Michala, Lecturer at the University of Glasgow in the school of computing science focused on IoT.

We talked about why they chose the blockchain technology to store and share the data of the malaria test results. It was a very interesting chat and worth a listen, even if you are not too familiar with what the blockchain technology is.

A big thanks to the guys of news site The Conversation where I read about the project for the first time. They have very interesting content about global issues and a podcast called The Conversation weekly.

Also, I strongly recommend that you read about the project EMT site - in this link.

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