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."

Comments

Forget HIV, Malaria is enough to make this cool

[Neuticle]

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.