A NOTE FROM THE EDITOR
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The pages of EMDM are a bit like an exploded view—figuratively and literally—of modern medical devices. We cover everything from supremely sophisticated implantable electronics to relatively simple moulded plastic parts as long as they share a common purpose: making a diagnostic or medical device work. One item that we have never featured in our parade of products, as far as I can recall, is a mobile phone. Perhaps we should. Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley), have turned a smart phone into an imaging device that can identify and track diseases. The CellScope could bring fluorescent medical imaging technology to developing countries and other parts of the world with limited healthcare resources.
Many developing countries lack access to clinical-quality microscopes necessary for even basic diagnostics. The CellScope essentially leapfrogs this technology by allowing health workers to take high-resolution images using a tube-like extension that attaches to the mobile phone’s camera. Automated software performs an analysis in the field, or the photos can be transmitted to experts at medical centres. The research team in Berkeley has successfully imaged malaria and tuberculosis using the CellScope system.
Microscopes aren’t available even for simple screenings in many parts of the developing world, explains Daniel Fletcher, Associate Professor, Bioengineering, at UC Berkeley in a video interview [5]. “If we are to improve healthcare in the developing world,” says Fletcher, “rather than buy big microscopes and put them in local health centres, which often don’t exist in those countries, we can use technology to leapfrog and make microscopy portable.”
The mobile phone as a leapfrog technology to improve healthcare outcomes in the poorest parts of the world is also the subject of an insightful special report on the Economist.com. The article, titled “A Doctor in Your Pocket,” cites one mobile health technology initiative launched in a province of South Africa. As much as a quarter of the population in South Africa is HIV positive, but fewer than 5% know that they are because they are loathe to set foot in a clinic. Project Masiluleke uses a form of texting to blast millions of messages each day urging people across the country in their local language to get in touch with the national AIDS hotline. Once contact has been made, they are told about clinics they can go to outside their immediate community. In the future, they will be offered test kits for home use.
Project Masiluleke reportedly has had considerable success reaching a young male population that typically tunes out such appeals. In this case, the medium made the message stick because, as one of the project organisers put it, mobile phones are very personal: a message on your phone forces you to think and maybe act in a way that a billboard or radio ad does not.
The article, posted on the Economist.com [6], is well worth reading.
As noted in the piece, Bill Gates once held the view that modern technology could not help the world’s poor. When you’re living on less than a dollar a day, “you’re just buying food. You’re trying to stay alive,” he told attendees of a technology conference. The former head of Microsoft, who currently devotes his full attention to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, has had a change of heart. “Poor people absolutely deserve better technology,” he now says, adding that great advances for the developed world could emerge from those leapfrogging innovations in the developing world.
We hear you, Bill. But don’t think for a minute that gets you off the hook for foisting Vista on us.
