microscope
Posted by SushmitaNY on Aug 20, 2009
Newsweek recently did a story on this discovery entitled Dial "D" for Diagnosis. The story makes the connection to what we reported on ealier: the potential of mobile tech for disease diagnosis.
This potentially socially transforming technology was the result of a challenge to a class of Biomedical Engineering graduate students at University of California, Berkeley, by Professor Daniel Fletcher.
He asked the students to respond to an imaginary scenario: You are hiking in a remote village where an unknown infectious disease is spreading. What could you build with only a camera cell phone and a backpack of lenses that might help identify the disease? The product: the Cellscope (please bear with the intro advert) and here is the YouTube video.
Posted by SushmitaNY on Aug 16, 2009
A group of researchers from University of California at Berkeley and San Francisco have built a fascinating new device, which should make disease diagnosis in the field in the developing world a lot more feasible. The new device takes advantage of the recent penetration of mobile telephones in the remotest parts of the world – places where there are few health amenities, or even reliable roads and power.
Most mobile telephones today have built-in cameras which, although they may not be the dream of a professional photographer, can nevertheless produce digital images at sufficient resolution for diagnostic pathology. The researchers have combined a camera-equipped mobile phone with a simple light microscope, and packaged it into a simple, portable and rugged “diagnostic field microscope” (for technical details, please see here).
