Smartphone Touchscreens Could Analyze Biological Smears to Diagnose Illness

Diagnosis via Touchscreen Daniel Zanetti via Wikimedia

PopSci - The lab-on-a-chip model has been praised as the future of simplified diagnostic medicine–place a sample of saliva, blood, or urine on a small chip-like device that traps disease biomarkers, and send it off to a lab for analysis and diagnosis. But a couple of researchers at the Korea Advanced Institute for Science and Technology think we could simplify that process even further by doing the lab work on the touchscreens of our smartphones.

The duo thinks they can tap the property of capacitance that enables touchscreens to sense our fingertips to analyze much smaller things, like DNA or pathogens. Touchscreens are far more sensitive than they need to be to simply sense our fingers, they say, and that ability to detect small changes of capacitance could allow us to place a sample directly on our smartphone screens and analyze it for pathogens or disease markers. As NewScisays: spit on your iPhone, diagnose what’s ailing you.            More