Asian Accomodations

The idea that doctors in the developing world will be able to access medical instruments that would help in the fight against diseases such as tuberculosis and malaria is a step closer to actuality today.

The humble mobile provides the base technology for this new gadget. It is in essence a microscope that can be used outside the lab to exaimine samples including blood; and ideally prevent a number of diseases killing people.

Researchers at the university of California Berkeley have expressed an opinion that they hope the gadget would be deployed in areas where the huge price tag of equipment and training currently prevents access to basic diagnostic tests.

While advanced medical imaging systems and computerised medical equipment remain the privilege of the rich, mobiles are now ubiquitous - we have been advised that there are more than four billion mobile connections across the world.

The CellScope microscope attachment clips on to an ordinary mobile and uses the inbuilt camera to process the images, allowing medics to quickly screen for diseases including TB and sickle-cell. Doctors can perform complicated high-resolution light microscopy on a blood or sputum sample placed on a slide.

The team who developed the CellScope have tested the microscope on a number of mobiles, and they agree that there are more accurate pieces of technology available, but sufficent pictures were seen using a standard Nokia N73, which only has a 3.2 megapixel camera

The team said that there is the possibility of performing realtime sample analysis now instead of patients having to wait until results are sent back from a lab.

“Since we are developing a technology that makes the current and long-standing internationally accepted standards for disease screening in developing countries more portable, we anticipate that a relatively fast time to adoption by clinicians and health workers may be possible.”

Furthermore many of the newer smart phones have special features including GPS and internet connectivity, which when combined with the disease screening data from the CellScope could immediatley be used to plot outbreaks across a geographical region.