miCROWDscopy wins the European Foundations Award for Responsible Research & Innovation

miCROWDscopy: Video games and mobile microscopes for collective telediagnosis of global health diseases

The European Foundations Award for Responsible Research & Innovation (EFARRI) aims to identify research groups that have successfully incorporated methods to align research with the needs of society and contributed towards the development of a smart, inclusive and sustainable society. It supports Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) in the European Research Area. The EFARRI award provides a unique opportunity to explore, articulate and share promising responsible research practices across Europe.

The three winners of the EFARRI awards this year are the IMRR project from Politecnico di Milano, Mistra Urban Futures and miCROWDscopy from Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (Oficial). miCROWDscopy, still in development, is a citizen science project led by the MalariaSpot team. The complete case study is available on the EFARRI website.

‘miCROWDscopy develops collective tele-diagnosis systems to empower citizens to collaborate in solving global health challenges. It is based on a crowd-computing platform, which analyses medical images taken by a microscope embedded in a smartphone connected to the internet, using image processing and human crowdsourcing through online video games. This system will provide remote, rapid, ubiquitous and accurate diagnosis of global health diseases such as malaria or tuberculosis, which are responsible for the deaths of millions of people.’

‘This project intends to initiate the era of crowd diagnostics by connecting a global network of mobile microscopes and citizen diagnosers. The research team is designing open-source crowd-computing tools for image analysis and an open 3D-printed microscope-in-a-smartphone, which are extremely portable and low-cost, tailored to different global health pathologies. The practical implementation of the project is to develop a low-cost solution which is able to provide rapid and accurate diagnosis of malaria and tuberculosis, leveraging crowd computing, mobile microscopy and the efforts of global citizen diagnosers: non-medical specialists connected to the internet contributing to the diagnosis while playing a game.’

The project

Maria Postigo and Mark Meyendirk

More about EFARRI: http://efarri.eu/
More about miCROWDscopy: http://efarri.eu/finalist/microwdscopy/
More about MalariaSpot: http://malariaspot.org/en/