More telemedicine than anything else, but this development is surely a pointer to the future dominance of mobile phone technology in telehealth.
A team at the University of California, Berkeley, has blended a cell phone and microscope to produce the ‘CellScope’. This turns camera-enabled cell phones, smartphones, handhelds and netbooks, such as an Intel-powered classmate PC, into high-resolution, handheld microscopes with the capability to capture and transmit images. CellScope provides a portable and inexpensive way to diagnose and monitor infectious diseases, such as tuberculosis and malaria in the developing world. And it was recently one of the four $100,000 winners of Intel’s INSPIRE•EMPOWER Challenge.