Four young Ugandan developers have
come up with a Malaria testing app that
will see users diagnose presence or
absence of malaria parasites in their
blood, without the need to visit a hospital.
Dubbed ‘Matibabu’ Swahili for ‘Treatment’,
the application was developed by Code 8
team made up of Brian Gitta, Joshua
Businge, Simon Lubambo and Josiah
Kavuma, who were also named this year’s
winners of the Imagine Cup Women’s
Empowerment Award at Microsoft’s global
student software competition

How The Application Work
The application uses a specially designed
device which they named “matiscope”, used
to conduct rapid diagnostic test. A user
inserts their finger into the device that uses
red light to penetrate the skin to detect the
red blood cells.
“It’s been shown that infected red blood
cells have a different physical, chemical and
biomedical structure from a normal red
blood cell, hence we used light-scattering
technology to determine the scatter patterns
of both normal and infected cells,” Kavuma,
member of the Code 8 team told IPS.

The data is sent to the user’s phone for
processing, with a copy of the results also
shared on Microsoft’s Skydrive service
where doctors can further analyze the
results.
The team plans to have the matiscope ready
for the market in two years, but in the
meantime, the application will be free for
download.