Your smartphone could be your all-in-one Doctor

Smartphones, rather drastically, have revolutionized our day-to-day life by enabling us to perform complex tasks and functions at the tip of our fingertip. Since its inception in 1973 when Motorola built the first ever mobile phone, smartphones have been our constant companion. In the recent past, with radical developments being made in on-chip hardware and software systems, smartphones have paved the way for the next generation of medical devices that promise wide availability and accessibility, convenient handling and lower cost!

When we think of seeing a doctor, probably the first thing that comes to our mind is the stethoscope – a device that is used by the doctor to listen to the patient’s heart and lungs beating and draw clinical conclusions on the patient’s general health. Recently, M3DICINE came up with a cellphone based stethoscope – here, the microphone of the smartphone is used to record one’s heart and lungs beating and then by using a smartphone’s internal electronics and algorithms, the recorded sound is converted to visual graphs that is displayed on the smartphone itself. A more recent addition to this class of devices is the smartphone stethoscope by Steth IO. The entire process is carried out by the patient using an app that enables them to capture the data, store it as a file and even share that to a doctor within few seconds.

The next big thing that smartphones have a solution to is the ECG that records a patient’s heart condition and helps to diagnose heart strokes and any other abnormalities in the heart. Remember those ECG instruments in the hospital that looks like a computer-size box with multiple wires coming out that are attached to your chest – well it seems all of these could be done just by using your smartphone! A leading product in this category is the AliveCor Kardiamobile ECG that has been cleared by FDA and costs only US $90. The product looks just like a credit card that could be connected wirelessly to the smartphone. The patient touches the card using the index and middle finger of both the hands – this enables the card to pickup the pulse signals from the fingers that is then converted to sound signal and eventually sent to the phone where the pre-installed AliveCor Kardia app processes the sound signal and displays the heartbeat graph. Simple and convenient!

While heart is the central organ that keeps on pumping blood across our body, the other most important part of the human system is the brain; and thus studying the condition of the brain using EEG has for long been in practice to diagnose any disorder in the human nervous system. A standard EEG instrument consists of a box consisting of multiple wires that is connected in different parts on the human skull – something that is quite intimidating for most of us! However, scientist and doctors seem to have found a simpler solution to this. In 2017, a group of researchers from the Massachusetts General Hospital and Brown University in the USA, University of Toronto and University of Manitoba in Canada, Technical University of Denmark and the Jigme Dorji National Referral Hospital in Bhutan published their recent work in Nature where they have illustrated the design of a smartphone based EEG names as SBS2. The device comes with a simple cap that is worn on the head and is wireless connected to the cellphone. The cap consists of internally designed leads that are positioned at specific points and collect brain signals to be sent to the phone. A pre-installed app on the phone then analyses the captured signal and displays the EEG graph on the phone screen. The device comes at a price of US $300 which is 20 times less than the cost of a standard EEG instrument!

A supreme power that we are gifted with is our "vision" – what we see is what we believe, indeed! And hence Ophthalmology, the study of eye, is one of the most important topics in medicine. In general, a doctor uses a standard ophthalmoscope to takes pictures of the eye that provides information on glaucoma, diabetes, hypertension and few other disease conditions that the patient might have. And when we talk about taking pictures, we cannot but think of only one product immediately – our cellphones! It was not too late when the researchers also figured this out and hence came up with the smartphone based ophthalmoscope. Simply put, the device consists of a LED that is turned ON using a battery to illuminate the eye; the cellphone camera is then used to take pictures of the eye and finally the images are processed using a software on the phone to give out relevant information. Currently, Cellscope in the USA and Peekvision in the UK are the two leading companies in the path to commercializing the smartphone based ophthalmoscope.

Very recently, efforts have also been made to design smartphone based otoscope – a device used to diagnose disease and clinical conditions in the ears. Termed as a digital otoscope, this device also comes with an attachment that takes the high-resolution picture of the internal ear and sends it to the phone for diagnosis.

While the above products mostly resemble the front-store medical devices that we would come across in the hospital or clinic, smartphones have largely empowered the back-end tools and instruments that are pivotal in conducting research on medical diagnostics. Research from the University of California Los Angeles and Stanford University in the USA, along with some other academic as well as R&D institutions, have illustrated interesting findings on how to use the smartphone as a microscope to analyze blood or any other sample, or as a centrifuge to separate components from a fluid – standard practices for any biology lab!

It goes without saying that cellphones indeed have paved the way for saving hundreds and thousands of lives, through a convenient and cost-effective approach. With the rapid and continuous progress being in technology, there are improved models of cellphones coming up with higher camera quality, better microphone, greater processing power, more in-built sensors and wider connectivity. According to a recent report by Statista, the number of current mobile phone users is 3.5 billion, i.e., almost 45% of the total world population. With smartphones displaying the capability to facilitate medical diagnostics, imagine what impact it could have at the global scale where each one of us has an all-in-one master cellphone that we could use to perform medical tests on ourselves, sitting right inside our bedroom or even in an outside setting!

To learn more:

1.https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5673348/

2.https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5377373/

3.https://www.nature.com/articles/srep45567

4.https://starfishmedical.com/blog/smartphones-as-a-medical-device/

5.https://www.mobius.md/blog/2018/04/your-smartphone-is-now-a-medical-device/