Group Hopes to Use iPhones to Help Wipe Out Malaria on Indonesian Island

At this rate, owning an iDevice might be as essential to being a successful doctor as possessing a degree. Only a day after a British hospital reported that its practice of using iPad and iPods to monitor patents' health had led to lower mortality rates, a new crowd-funded project has popped up on IndieGogo claiming that Apple's famed handset might be able to help wipe out malaria on the Indonesian island of Bangka.

The team, known as IanXen, plans to use Bangka as a testing ground of sorts before tackling more ambitious projects over in Africa. The team will use a IanXen RAPID kit that will outfit an iPhone with a portable microscope, a lancet pen, and blood slides, thus allowing them to use the microscope to examine the slides with a microscope and make diagnoses within five seconds. The key attraction of the process is that it's relatively cheap, and could therefore make more headway in regions ravaged by malaria than conventional equipment.

According to the project's IndieGogo page, "3.3 billion people live at risk of malaria across 106 malaria-endemic countries. Although the risk is widespread, cases and deaths are concentrated in Africa. In 2010, over 80 percent of 216 estimated cases and over 90 percent of 655,000 estimated deaths occurred in Africa. Prompt diagnosis and effective treatment are the cornerstones of malaria case management; patients recover rapidly if diagnosed and treated early."

Sound like a cause worth fighting for? You can help out the team with a starting donation of £5 ($8.50), which will net you a mention on the project's Twitter feed. You can, of course, donate even more.

Follow this article's writer, Leif Johnson, on Twitter.