Scientists Hack Cellphone To Detect Diseases

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."

Re:How it works

[toppavak]

It may work, but its completely useless from a diagnostics standpoint. Knowing the size of a cell is useless, especially with the resolution and sensitivity a cell phone camera could provide. Past publications from this lab show no reliable size discrimination below 15 microns, so even if it were useful information, it would be useless for human cell samples of which nearly all interesting species are smaller than or border this threshold. Sub-cellular resolution might help you do something like malaria diagnostics, but the amount of sample that needs to be analyzed and the magnification level you would need to be able to discriminate the plasmodium within a red blood cell are so high that, surprise, you're so much better off using a $100 microscope.

Re:But...

[Velox_SwiftFox]

If you think this is exciting, wait until next month's article on how to turn an ordinary 7-color photo ink jet printer into a $119 DNA sequencing machine.

Of course, throwing out the old one and buying new will turn out to still be cheaper than buying refills for them.

Reware projects

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's the big BIG thing that is going to hit mainstream radar soon, though I haven't even seen much tech punditry as usual this year, with everyone so deflated over the economy, but I bechya this is going to be massive over the next few years. Re-waring / re-purposing, whatever you call it, basically a new layer and second wind to technology in developed AND developing countries. People stop building things from scratch, it's more expensive than reuse. Just make small mods.

For a decade or more, we've been producing basically general purpose computers disguised as specific function devices, like phones, pda and suchlike. This is the first fruits of tech convergence coupled with a tightening economy and environmental reluctance to dispose in landfills. Such industry will emerge based around unique, perculiar, creative repurposing of hardware en-masse, it becomes inevitable. Out of nowhere will come cellphones transformed into musical instruments, alarm clocks, intruder detectors, baby monitors, health aides, point to point walkie talkies, and from that ad-hoc userland communication networks that will eventually bypass and replace the telco choke point/gatekeeper model (In other words expect much development to be resisted and made "illegal" by vested interest groups under the cry of "health, safety and security".) But that will do nothing to stop this enevitable shift that prevailing conditions invite. Basically we have a situation of commodity hardware. The raw materials are zero cost (would already be in a landfill if the manufacturers had their way) and are easy to jailbreak/unlock and retask. There's something like 2 or 3 discarded cellphones to every person on Earth right now. Objects that cost less than a skilled hour of salary, can be retasked in seconds with firmware flashing and combining via USB or wifi networks. Certain models of things are obviously going to become really popular because they can be more easily rewared, their second hand value will rise again.

Re:But...

[symes]

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.

That's an interesting point and something similar happened after world war two when Germany's obliterated industry got completely rebuilt with all the latest tech. But there's always the issue of who pays...

Re:How it works

[toppavak]

Even if your point were valid, the microscope works, this gadget doesn't. You can reliably detect things like tuberculosis and malaria using a microscope, and if its a fluorescence model you could even do CD4+ T-cell counts manually. This cell-phone doohicky is incapable of all of those, or even of anything remotely medically relevant. As for your point, though, the w810i that they used in their contraption has a list price of about $200, still without managing to deal with the little problem that it.doesn't.work.

Re:Using only an LED?

[story645]

lebscorpio answered, but the geeky grammar explanation is that use of a and an is tagged to phonetics, not letters, so a gets used for a consonant sound and an when for a vowel sound.

In this case:
an 'cause commonly LED is read as el-ee-dee, (probably non accurate phonetic spelling) and el is a vowel sound.

Re:star trek isn't dead yet

[Hurricane78]

Doesn't matter much tough. I saw a medical professor close to tears because of the state of competence and the medical industry.

Main problems:
  Doctors don't think "I don't know this (yet)." They think "There will never ever exist a solution to this". This is because of their god complex.
  Doctors don't care for the underlying cause. Most of the time, they "fix" your symptoms by giving you drugs. Of course if you don't take them forever, everything goes back to how it was before.
  Patients believe the crap their doctors tell them. They do net think for themselves. Most often, they don't even want the heal the cause. They love to be (neurotically) ignorant about it.
  Doctors and the health industry earn more money when there are more sick people, instead of when there are more healthy people (which is interestingly the model used in China).
  The whole pharma industry works like any other industry: The main (and often only) target is to maximize profit.
  Health insurance companies work that way too. So their target is to get the most in, and the least out. "Ideally", you pay, and they deny you everything.

I have to push my doctor real hard until he even considers doing any tests. It's nearly impossible to find the underlying cause because of him.
And I tried dozens of doctors. They are no different. Most of the time they weasel their way out by just prescribing you painkillers... that way it does not hurt while you fuckin' die.

If I had money, I'd create my own health insurance. Completely owned by the insured. One CEO who is completely alone, and responsible for updates to the program. The rest is a program, created by me. That program allows the insured to completely control the terms of their contract and change them, including the income of the CEO. They can fire the CEO too, or fork the company, electing a new CEO. The program would manage how the money would be spent, by calculating what the insured want to spend or have to spend, to be able to deliver what they want or need.
At least this is the basic idea of the project. I will have the quirks worked out before I have that kind of money anyway. ;)

Re:Bullshit

[Spiked_Three]

No your bullshit. You are basing your conclusions on a stupid wired magazine article that was written for consumer consumption. The device does RNA/DNA amplfications on a credit card sized piece of platic (replacing the refrigerators) as well as flourecense tests you talk about, and a bunch of other test also. I saw the presentation on Washington University TV and it is quite real.