Use Your Cell Phone To Diagnose Blood Diseases 63
A group of research engineers at Berkeley have developed a mobile phone microscope that can photograph microbes in your blood, and analyze them for disease. The group hopes the device will be useful to doctors in developing countries to diagnose blood diseases in the field. The device uses a phone attachment with an LED, and magnified images are fed into the cell phone camera. Software installed on the phone analyzes bacterial counts, or the images can be sent to labs for quick analysis. UC Berkeley bioengineer Dan Fletcher led the CellScope research team. He said, "The same regions of the world that lack access to adequate health facilities are, paradoxically, well-served by mobile phone networks. We can take advantage of these mobile networks to bring low-cost, easy-to-use lab equipment out to more remote settings . . . We had to disabuse ourselves of the notion that we needed to spend many thousands on a mercury arc lamp and high-sensitivity camera to get a meaningful image. We found that a high-powered LED — which retails for just a few dollars — coupled with a typical camera phone could produce a clinical quality image sufficient for our goal of detecting in a field setting some of the most common diseases in the developing world."
It looks painful, but hopeful for Africa and India (Score:2, Insightful)
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This will be a huge boon to Africa and India. These are places where the reach of technology is just now touching, and best of all it is doing it all wirelessly. So the people of these nations have cellphone access but no landline access. It's a very interesting turn of events.
The water-borne blood diseases of India and the insect-borne blood diseases of Africa are incorrigible killers. I hope that some of the damage Rachel Carson did can be reversed. Call it White-guilt or whatever, but helping our fellow man out of the dark ages and into a happier and healthier era can only be a good thing, I think.
Re:A cheap simple diagnostic tool.. (Score:2, Insightful)
Until Glaxo or some other company like that buys the patent and makes sure it never sees the light of day again so they can keep making over priced, expensive to maintain peices of equipment to us. Its silly to think they'll let their pocket padding business go away any time soon.
Re:iPhone (Score:2, Insightful)
Nah. Won't be compatible with the iPhone. Will be blocked from the store because it infringes the rights of Monsanto. Or it will be in Java, which every phone on the plane, except the iPhone, can do.