The cell phone, a portable device used to make calls, keep in touch with friends and family and also take pictures and look at the latest media, but who would have thought it would be used for medical purposes. The Cell scope, designed by Berkeley Bioengineering researchers is the latest advancement in cell phone technology. The cell scope is designed to magnify images up to 60x zoom or more to view the surface of the skin and hopefully when fully developed view ever closer things like cells and parasites.
So what can the cell scope do as of now? At the moment in its development it can determine some diseases (i.e. Malaria in a blood sample or if you want to use the 5x zoom you could even detect minor skin conditions). Now the real question is, how and why would I want to use this? Well at face value the cell scope just looks like a cool toy to play with, but in all seriousness this could be a useful device to diagnose illnesses and then MMS it to your local or non-local doctors and get a diagnoses without having to leave your house or current location. Or a better example would be getting these cell scopes out to foreign countries and giving them a better chance of diagnosing their illnesses.
Financially, these cell scopes would run for about 75 dollars and were originally made from parts around their workshop such as wires, belt loops etc. and even though not on the shelves at the moment they are currently being produced and worked on. All in all these cell scopes are becoming more and more real to us and we will defiantly see these in the near future.
http://cellscope.berkeley.edu/
http://thefutureofthings.com/news/1155/the-birth-of-the-cell-phone-microscope.html
2 comments:
Hey Josh this sounds really cool actually but you should just add the term microscopy. Microscopy is a tool in the diagnosis and management of infectious diseases. The only problem is that in some developing countries they dont have access to this kind of technology. So just to add this will show how som countries need a tool like this to help out with illness and such in these countries.
It is also important to note how the researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, were able to reduce the price of the normally high priced Fluorescence microscopy. They used filters in able to block the background light and in order to restrict a light source (a simple light-emitting diode (LED) ) necessary to excite the green fluorescent dye in the TB-infected blood. Using a cell phone with a 3.2 megapixel camera, they had a spatial resolution of 1.2 micrometers. “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." said Dan Fletcher, UC Berkeley associate professor of bioengineering and head of the research team developing the CellScope.
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