March 20 2008 / by juldrich
Category: Business & Work Year: 2008 Rating: 14 Hot
Cross-posted from jumpthecurve.net. 
Earlier this month I gave a presentation to the Kansas Hospital
Association on the topic of “the future of rural health care.” In
my presentation, I discussed how the cellphone will become an
increasingly important tool in helping patients diagnose certain
diseases quicker and more accurately. (I briefly touch on this
theme in this old post.)
What I did not discuss was how the cellphone might also help
health care workers in remote, rural areas take high-resolution
images of a patient’s blood cells using a cellphone camera and then
transmit those photos to experts at medical centers.
As this informative article from today’s
Technology Review discusses, however, this vision is now on
the verge of being achieved thanks to the innovative work of
researchers at the University of California.
(cont.)
When thinking about the potential of this technology there are
two things to keep in mind. First, the prototype equipment was
built for $75 using off-the-shelf components—so it is not
expensive. Second, the resolution of existing higher-end cellphones
is already sufficient for capturing the details needed to identify
blood cells and cancer cells. In other words, the technology is
good enough to be implemented now. (One immediate application might
be to help Leukemia patients in remote areas transmit images for
white blood cell counts).
Longer-term, I would remind rural health care professional that
the resolution on next generation cellphones is only going to get
better. When one then further considers the advances in bandwidth
capability which will be achieved through programs such as Internet2, it
will soon become possible to transmit even more detailed health
care information in the future.
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