Doctor on call: Simple accessories could turn mobile phones into useful medical devices

The Economist

http://www.economist.com/science/displaystory.cfm?story_id=11367989

May 15, 2008

Dan Fletcher, a professor of bioengineering at UC Berkeley, has developed a cheap attachment to turn the digital camera on many of today's mobile phones into a microscope. Called a CellScope, it can show individual white and red blood cells, which means that with the correct stain it can be used to identify the parasite that causes malaria. And Berkeley professor of mechanical engineering Boris Rubinsky and his colleagues think they could help make medical imagining simpler, cheaper and more widely available by using mobile phones to send raw imaging data to a base where it could be processed.