AI-Powered Malaria Test Readers Strengthen DR Congo's National Malaria Control Programme

The Democratic Republic of Congo's Ministry of Health, through its Programme National de Lutte contre le Paludisme (PNLP), deployed Deki Reader devices developed by Fio Corporation and rolled out with support from Chemonics International, using computer-vision image-analysis software to automatically interpret malaria rapid diagnostic test strips instead of relying on a health worker's visual reading.

Results are transmitted to a cloud database (Fionet) that feeds into the national health information system; devices were first deployed at scale, around 300 units, in Haut-Katanga and Lualaba provinces starting in 2015-2016, and a peer-reviewed process evaluation trained 185 healthcare providers on their use across 144 health facilities in Haut-Katanga, Lualaba and Kasai-Central provinces between January and December 2022.

By the end of the 2022 evaluation period, 120 of the deployed devices (83.3%) had functioned for more than ten months while 24 devices (16.7%) were non-operational; the evaluation also found that health workers had systematically over-reported malaria positivity compared with the AI-read result from the same test strip, though the authors stated that a quantified comparison of the two reporting methods would be presented in a separate publication.

The evidence base is comparatively strong for a device-level health intervention, combining a peer-reviewed academic process evaluation with a defined facility count and study period and corroborating vendor and partner documentation, but the peer-reviewed evaluation reports device uptime and implementation feasibility rather than validated diagnostic-accuracy figures, and no evidence was found of a repeated, ongoing, published evaluation cycle since 2022.