New research from Korea is suggesting that you can self-diagnose yourself with your smartphone with a push of a button. Yes, you no longer have to trust Google or WebMD to tell you, your phone will simply read it off your spit to tell you that you have the flu, or food poisoning.
Hyun Gyu Park and Byoung Yeon Won, both from the Korea Advanced Institute for Science, say that the your smartphone would become a “lab-on-a-chip” – where you simply inject a droplet of some bodily fluid – blood, saliva and even urine, and it will then process it by targeting disease biomarker molecules. This is because the supersensitive of the smartphone’s screen.
“Since these touchscreens can detect very small capacitance changes we thought they could serve as highly sensitive detection platforms for disease biomarkers,” Park told the New Scientist.
And yes, they have made a proof-of-concept that somewhat works. Both Park and Won tested this by dropping three different solutions containing concentrations of bacteria linked to chlamydia onto an iPhone-sized multitouch display. However, while it could recognise it, it could not identify the individual pathogens.
But hey, it’s first steps to urinating on your iPhone in order to determine if you have a bladder infection. Also, if this does actually go ahead, please make sure you clean your smartphone thoroughly.