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Use Your Cell Phone To Diagnose Blood Diseases
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."
You mean like East Texas and Louisiana?
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Someone is already writing the "Do I have Malaria" app I bet.
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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.
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I've invented a special coin that can tell you if you have a specific disease with only 50% false positives!
1) Cheap equipment is a bit worse. It might not impact performance at all, but chances are, some sue-happy person might win malpractice case thatnks to 'subpar equipment used'. Cheap in this case can be pretty expensive.
2) Costs are directly transalted to customer. And people will pay a LOT when their health is concerned. So, if customers can afford to pay you for expensive stuff ... you might as well let em pay because your profit margins can be bigger. Simply, you can have lab test cost 10$ and add margin of say 5$, or you can have lab test costing 100$ and add margin of 50$.
3) Expensive stuff means more profit for equipment makers (bigger price -> bigger margins). Enough to be able to advertize and add little, hmm, personal incentive to buy pricey stuff.
4) And sometimes, you really DO need that expensive stuff because it can make difference between life and death.
-- Technology for the sake of technology is as pathetic as eschewing technology because it's technology.
There's an app for that.
When seeing this setup, I immediately thought "What about combining this with a digital SLR camera?".
Those usually have exchangeable lenses, and the instrument could lock to the camera body instead of the normal lens. That should give much better image quality due to the better sensor and still be affordable.
For $400 - $500 you have a wide selection of DSLR cameras at places like Amazon. Assume another $500 for the attached microscope and you get a $1000 camera microscope, which is still cheap for medical equipment.
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It's not only low-hanging fruit, but developing nations are, by definition, poor. If you string up 5 miles of copper phone line during the day, it's a sure bet that it will be pulled down that night. It's practically impossible to prevent, and copper is easily turned into cash. Ask anyone who's ever attempted a network build-out in one of the less advantaged regions of the world.