Need a microscope in the field? There’s a wireless phone app for that
Monday, November 9th, 2009A professor of electrical engineering at UCLA has developed a way to perform many of the functions of a traditional microscope using a cell phone and about $10 worth of hardware, according to the New York Times.
Aydogan Ozcan, who has already formed a tech startup to help monetize the new technology, told the Times that the modified cell phones could be useful for doctors attempting to screen for diseases in remote areas with limited access to medical equipment.
Ozcan’s device uses simple LEDs grafted to the basic cell phone camera to illuminate slides placed on top of it, and creates a holographic image of the patterns created by light scatter in the sample.
While others have created applications similar to Ozcan’s – notably the University of California at Berkeley’s Cellscope – none has been so fully featured and cheap. Neven Karlovac, the chief executive of Ozcan’s Microskia company, says that many of the company’s products will be upgrade kits for existing phones, as well as more complicated designs for phones without cameras or those that are too small to mount the hardware.
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