Childhood anemia is a public health problem in Peru. The country’s office of the Pan American Health Organization and the World Health Organization estimates that it affects 44% of children, some 700,000.
Anemia occurs when there are not enough red corpuscles in the blood. Therefore, the capacity of the blood to transport oxygen to the body, as it needs it, is insufficient.
Physicist Mirko Zimic and his team from the Universidad Peruana Cayetano Heredia, set out to respond to the difficulties in diagnosing anemia in children in Per´ú: needle punctures can be very invasive for children under the age of three, where there is a higher incidence of anemia, and in remote rural areas of Peru there are no medical personnel or equipment to take samples.
Zimic and his team then developed a simple diagnostic system: an app that takes a picture of the lower eyelid of the eye, drawing on that custom of the popular wisdom of grandmothers to lower their eyelids to see if that part of the eye is pale or red enough. Something the doctors also used.
“We set out to transfer that classic procedure to one that was more objective,” Zimic told El País.
The application has an algorithm that will determine, depending on whether the color is more or less pale, if there is anemia or not in the patient.
An intelligent telephone is needed, with which a photograph of the child’s lower eyelid must be taken. With the patient’s basic data, this information is sent, through an app created for this purpose, to servers at the university where Zimic and his team work, according to Capital.pe.
“In order to be able to transmit the image from the cell phone to the data center, an operative application has been developed for the Android system, which not only collects the child’s photo and data, but also geolocation data,” Zimic added, quoted by Capital.pe.
Once the data is received in real time, the team processes the image and estimates the hemoglobin level in the blood.
Six hundred diagnoses have been made of children in Lima Norte, in the capital region, and Canta, some 110 kilometers northwest of the capital.
The El País article points out that the results coincided “in more than 90%” with laboratory tests, in severe or moderate anemias, and 87% in mild anemias.
A second phase of implementation of this development is planned with 500 more children.
Mirco Zimic’s innovation won this year a financing of 90 thousand dollars in the contest “Innóvate Peru”, launched by the state-run laboratory of social innovation Ayni Lab of the Ministry of Development and Social Inclusion of Peru.