April 17, 2012 –
A team of bioengineering students tied for first prize in the annual Berkeley Big Ideas competition this week!
Berkeley students Philippe DeCorwin-Martin, Austin Kwong, Xin Xin Lin and Nawal Siddiqui led the “Assessing Hemoglobin Levels in Resource-Poor Setting” project. The team is developing an Android-based application for mobile phones as a cheap, portable and accurate diagnostic tool to test for anemia. Approximately 2 billion people around the world suffer from anemia, which contributes significantly to infant and mother mortality rates, said Siddiqui, with more than 1 million people dying every year. Currently, it costs clinics $1 to $2 per test, according to DeCorwin-Martin, who estimated his team’s image-analysis software could cut that to about 5 cents per test.
The proposal grew out of a team project in BioE 192 last fall, the undergraduate capstone design class.
Congratulations!
Learn more at the UC Berkeley NewsCenter