This Will be HUGE for Telemedicine & Rural Healthcare

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November 9, 2009 12:45 PM PST

How your cell phone can diagnose disease

by Elizabeth Armstrong Moore

 

The hardware added to this cell phone costs around $10.

(Credit: Ozcan Research Group/UCLA)

 

"To picture the next-gen microscope, don't picture a microscope at all. Aydogan Ozcan, an assistant professor of electrical engineering and member of the California NanoSystems Institute at UCLA, is adapting cell phones to sample biological images.

"This is no iPhone app. Ozcan, who formed the company Microskia (on the heels of the UC Berkeley team that developed CellScope), has built a prototype whose cell phone camera sensor can detect a slide's contents at a cellular level--reading, for example, an increase in white blood cell count that might indicate a new infection or injury. That information can then be forwarded wirelessly to a lab or hospital."

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