A team of researchers in Indiana are developing a smartphone app that detects anemia, West Lafayette, Ind.-based Purdue University announced Nov. 29.
Here are six things to know about the research project.
1. Young Kim, PhD, an associate professor at the Weldon School of Biomedical Engineering at Purdue, and Md Munirul Haque, PhD, a research scientist with the Regenstrief Center for Healthcare Engineering at Purdue, led the development of the app, called smartphone-based bloodless spectrometerless HEemoglobin Analyzer, or sHEA.
2. sHEA aims to make detecting anemia, a condition prevalent among cancer patients, easier to detect. The app asks users to take a smartphone photo of their inner eyelid. Hemoglobin-detection algorithms will then analyze these color photos to attempt to measure the levels of hemoglobin in a patient's blood, which is indicative of anemia.
3. The team recently received $73,000 in funding from the Indiana Clinical and Translational Sciences Institute to assess the app's effectiveness in cancer patients. The Indiana Clinical and Translational Sciences Institute is a collaboration between Purdue, Bloomington-based Indiana University and the University of Notre Dame (Ind.) that aims to deploy scientific discoveries to the patient population.
4. The Indiana Clinical and Translational Sciences Institute grant will allow the research team to work with Attaya Suvannasankha, MD, an assistant professor of hematology and oncology at the Indianapolis-based Indiana University School of Medicine, to introduce the app to 144 cancer patients at the Indiana University Melvin and Bren Simon Cancer Center.
5. The research team also plans to spend the first four months of 2018 testing the app at a Kenya-based laboratory associated with Academic Model Providing Access to Healthcare, an academic medical partnership led by IU School of Medicine.
6. The researchers' goal for the project deployment in Indiana and Kenya is to provide additional data to inform a reliable hemoglobin-detection algorithm.