Turning a Cell Phone Into a Microscope

stupendou writes with this excerpt from the New York Times: "Microscopes are invaluable tools to identify blood and other cells when screening for diseases like anemia, tuberculosis and malaria. But they are also bulky and expensive. Now an engineer, using software that he developed and about $10 worth of off-the-shelf hardware, has adapted cellphones to substitute for microscopes." But not based on optical magnification: the article explains that Aydogan Ozcan, a UCLA assistant professor of electrical engineering, has combined the wireless transmission abilities and imaging sensors now typical in wireless phones to make the phones capable of detecting cell abnormalities and more by capturing wave interference patterns from body fluids — like blood — and sending them on for analysis.

Update 20091108 15:03 GMT by timothy: Dave Bullock mentions this gallery he shot last year for Wired showing how a phone is hacked to add microscope abilities. "The new version looks a bit more polished, to say the least," he writes.

Gives a whole new meaning to...

[Genda]

CELL PHONE

Need a mass spectrometer?

[Hognoxious]

Need a mass spectrometer? There's an app for that!

That is cool.....

[phantomfive]

....but I am more interested in turning a cell phone into explosives [xkcd.org].

Makes you wonder

[physburn]

Makes me wonder, why there are a lot more cheap electronic microscopes around, if there that simple to make, everyone should have a USB microscope, to connect to the computer, complete with a neural network program to detect know microorganism, and especially pathogens. Every hypochrondic in the world could then join in a global pathogen detection network.

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