Scientists Hack Cellphone To Detect Diseases 100
Dave Bullock (eecue) plugs his piece up at Wired on a cellphone modded into a portable blood tester. This could become a significant piece of medical technology. "A new MacGyver-esque cellphone hack could bring cheap, on-the-spot disease detection to even the most remote villages on the planet. Using only an LED, plastic light filter, and some wires, scientists at UCLA have modded a cellphone into a portable blood tester capable of detecting HIV, malaria, and other illnesses. Blood tests today require either refrigerator-sized machines that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars or a trained technician who manually identifies and counts cells under a microscope. These systems are slow, expensive and require dedicated labs to function. And soon they could be a thing of the past."
Interesting comment on Wired's website (Score:5, Insightful)
Posted by: jamesdionne:
I agree.
Re:But... (Score:5, Insightful)
Inventions like this raise the level of technology available to most of the world, and do more good for more people than (say) yet another model of iPod. One of the main things I've learned from studying history is that the maximum level of technology in a society is less important than the level that the masses have. Making things cheaper is one of the main ways in which technology has advanced; eg. iron is actually inferior to bronze in several ways, but is cheaper.
In fact, in some ways poor countries have had an opportunity to leapfrog the West. If your country has never had a copper-wire phone system, and you're just getting started with phones, you may as well start off with cell phones or fiber optics.
Re:star trek isn't dead yet (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:star trek isn't dead yet (Score:4, Insightful)
Not just the building blocks, but the first of many iterations. The compute power going into cell phones lately is pretty high and it won't be long before you can do much more. Imagine a small suitcase lab powered by a cellphone and a few accessories. It will cost less than those $100 laptops and do much more for poor communities. Imagine your $100 donation every year keeping 1000 in better physical health? Imagine....
With a bit of tech and a sat link, very expensive western doctors can very cheaply be part of the suitcase experiment that allows them to add their knowledge to a database of medical knowledge that builds the code for the first robotic doctor, or online third world doctor.
Software can be written that uses video analysis to identify visible symptoms if there is a picture of the patient when not sick. All that ear/nose/throat simple visual analysis can be done by a computer or a tech with medical computers etc. If a cell phone can do this much already, just wait.
Now, if Bill G were really interested in changing the world's health... perhaps he'd get on-board with this obvious idea. Who knows. He's got a lot of money.
Forget HIV, Malaria is enough to make this cool (Score:5, Insightful)
I can see this possibly evolving into something that would be able to detect malaria infections, malaria is pretty big and easy enough to spot with good magnification and a little bit of training. Parasite laden blood cells are often chock-full of little plasmodium, so they would definitely have different optical properties in this kind of system. This could also probably do a reliable job of some basic blood values like hemoglobin levels, where the item in question has strong, distinct light-absorbing properties, but it won't come close to replacing an actual lab: there are too many things that just don't interact enough or interact distinctly enough with light to be measured that way, even if you had a lab-quality variable-frequency light source.
HIV, however, is a virus, and can not currently be detected or diagnosed microscopically (barring electron microscopes), so I'm a bit skeptical on that point. Besides, we have antibody tests that are cheap, effective and (thanks to foreign aid) available even in the poorest, most remote areas. The problem with testing for HIV is not detecting it, it's getting people tested. There is still a HUGE stigma around it, and people are (often with good reason) worried about the privacy of tests. If this guy has figured out how to detect and, more importantly, identify viruses using light microscopy, he'll be up for a Nobel prize, but I highly doubt that is the case. It's more likely that Wired just embellished the story a bit, which I think is unnecessary since even being able to quickly and reliably detect just parasites in the blood like malaria, leishmaniasis or trypanosomes would be a big help for many in the developing world.
I spent 2 years living in remote, rural Tanzania and some of the clinics near me diagnose malaria in every blood smear they see, because they don't have someone well trained enough to examine the blood, or they don't actually have a functioning microscope (they are freaking expensive, very fragile and hard to get out in the boonies) so they err on the side of caution. Even though they are probably correct a good percentage of the time, people were often "diagnosed" with malaria when they had none of the symptoms: Malaria gets the blame for nearly every ailment. This leads to overuse of anti-malarial drugs, which leads to drug-resistance. I also saw anemia being diagnosed very frequently as well, with out any way to properly test for it. It was the second most popular target for any ailment. "Anemic" people are encouraged to eat a substance made from red clay. It probably has plenty iron so it could actually help and probably can't do any harm, but it tasted about like you would expect dirt to taste.
To make my point: if this all this could do was detect malaria and hemoglobin levels, at even 10x the cost of a cell phone, but as portable and as durable as a cell phone (relative to a microscope that won't survive a car ride), it would make a sizable impact for a lot of people.
Re:20 year old technique (Score:3, Insightful)
A roll of film is not reusable.
Re:star trek isn't dead yet (Score:3, Insightful)
Torrent Please! (Score:3, Insightful)
For the good of mankind.
And before anyone says a word about IP or profit motive, take a few minutes to think about how unchecked/unrealistic profit motive has lead the US and world economy.
Yes, the inventors/innovators (yup, that means the grad students as well professor) of this should make a tidy profit. This should not preclude non-profit use, and especially not preclude open discussion of how to make such potentially live saving technology better.
Its time for med-tech (and pharma) to come out of greed's dark ages.
So "private" healthcare isn't insurance? (Score:2, Insightful)
Insurance, in law and economics, is a form of risk management primarily used to hedge against the risk of a contingent loss. Insurance is defined as the equitable transfer of the risk of a loss, from one entity to another, in exchange for a premium, and can be thought of as a guaranteed small loss to prevent a large, possibly devastating loss. An insurer is a company selling the insurance; an insured is the person or entity buying the insurance.
So you're saying this *does* apply to taxes and public healthcare, but not to private health care?
because it seems to me to be really, really arbitrary how you don't see one as stealing, but you do the other.
And considering that US per capita health care spending is more than double that of the other G7/European countries, (see my other comment in this thread if you like) I'd say you should care more about getting the care costs down, as that will automatically lower (the need for those idiotically high) premiums.
It's outright sad that one third to half the US doesn't have access to health care, and that (anecdotal point) "Free Clinics" can still charge you 200$ for their free services. (this was for an SF guy i know who needed an allergy prescription worth 20$)
And it's all made possible because of that weird fiction that health care is something special, rather than a basic right.
It allows doctors to charge more (although they also have to pay enormous tuition fees because of lack of government funding), insurers to require more (because people can opt out, there's less carrying power or whatever it's called, because of the reduced number of people paying into the system, which means the costs can be spread less), and so on.
imagine how much more affordable health care could be if spending was more in line with european spending.. you'd be able to keep healthy 60-80% more people easily at the same cost, people who then would also have smaller chances of contracting other illnesses (prevention is better than cure and all), who could work more (because they were healthier), and so on.
Choosing to have a partially-diseased workforce is stealing from your GNP just as much as other things are.. it just depends on how far ahead you're able/willing to look.