Slashdot Mirror
Pee On Your Phone STD Test
Shakrai writes "British health officials are hard at work on a new app that will allow users to pee into their cell phones and find out within minutes if they have an STD. From the article: 'Doctors and technology experts are developing small devices, similar to pregnancy testing kits, that will tell someone quickly and privately if they have caught an infection through sexual contact. People who suspect they have been infected will be able to put urine or saliva on to a computer chip about the size of a USB chip, plug it into their phone or computer and receive a diagnosis within minutes, telling them which, if any, sexually transmitted infection (STI) they have. Seven funders, including the Medical Research Council, have put £4m into developing the technology via a forum called the UK Clinical Research Collaboration.'"
not sure i'm going to want to hold that phone again
How about a little rig with capillary tubes etched throughout a couple of thin plastic plates that you touch edgewise to some urine or blood, that pulls the fluid through, then snaps into a little frame attached to the phone's camera lens. All calibrated to give image data to a server that looks for interactions of disease causes/products with the sizes, shapes and materials in the tubes. Then sends results back to the phone. The little rig should be small and cheap enough to dispense in nightclub bathrooms or drugstores, neater than a pregnancy test, and without leaving any analysis up to the user's eyesight, manual dexterity or intelligence.
The people we most want getting prompt STD infection results are the ones who already aren't competent to keep safe by practicing safe sex. And other infectious diseases are just a little further back in the "evolution safety skills" stack. "Foolproof" is the #1 design objective, because fools have a higher rate of being the most important user segment.
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make install -not war
...you'd think people with smartphones have the money and sense to use protection.
Well, protection only reduces your chance of contracting certain diseases, it does not eliminate it. It's also less than effective on certain (herpes) STIs than is commonly believed.
Monogamy > protection. Added bonus: Not having to use condoms. That interface didn't evolve with a piece of latex in mind....
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
People who pee on their phones are less likely to get any sexually transmitted disease, because they're less likely to get any sex (with another person, anyway).
However, those phone peeing people who do get sex are more likely to catch something dirty, given the kind of people who will have sex with them.
The use stats of a device like this could tell us quite a lot about human nature.
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make install -not war
Not all STDs can be tested for via a urine test, but if average person pee's and detects no infection it may actually give them a false sense of security and thus help increase infection rates of STDs that require blood or other tests.
The above could also lead to a game of "lets pee on the phone *before* we have sex and if we both come up clean then we can ditch the condoms" - yeah that'll help infection rates
Some previous responses have said "People who can afford smart phones are smart enough to use protection". I'll counter with "People who can afford smart phones can also afford alcohol, and alcohol and urgency will decrease protection usage"
Finally what is the false negative rate of this test
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