Mobile phone microscopes can diagnose malaria
News brought to you by Skint Tariffs, providers of price comparison for cheap international calls. Mobile phones can be quickly turned into microscopes that can be used to identify malaria, scientists have reported.
The University of California, Berkeley, has developed an attachment which enables the phone's camera to pick out individual white and red blood cells, which it then transmits over the mobile networks to doctors who can base a diagnosis on what they can see.
An example used by professor of bioengineering Dan Fletcher involved establishing whether or not a patient miles away had malaria.
The team behind the device started with a prototype the size of a tabletop, but whittled it down to a tube which houses lenses and is snapped directly onto the phone.
The device also features a clip to hold a sample slide in place which can be viewed at different levels of magnification.
Mircosoft has donated camera phones to the project, while Nokia and the research arm of the US Department of Defence have expressed an interest.
As well as making cheap international calls from their handsets, doctors could soon be able to make life saving diagnostics.
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