Device Turns A Cellphone Into A Microscope

“Say you're in a remote or undeveloped part of the world, and you have to diagnose an illness. Even if you could find a microscope, you don't have a doctor to look through it, but you do have a cell phone. What if you could attach the phone to the microscope, call another cell phone halfway around the world, and have the doctor with this phone see what the microscope sees? That's the idea behind CellScope.”
The new CellScope turns a standard camera cell phone into a microscope of clinical quality with a magnification of up to 50X. This proves to be of great value for the health workers in the developing countries, where there is scarcity of proper equipments due to heavy cost or physicians. In such places and conditions the CellScope plays a vital role as the health workers can easily capture necessary images of blood cells and infections and then transmit through the cell phone network to the experts for further analysis.

The CellScope, developed by the research scholars of University of California at Berkeley is not just a fun device but has the potential to save lives even. Just by clipping the device to your camera cell phone, PDA or netbook, you can easily collect and organize data of patients. The organized data can then be sent wirelessly to the remote experts and receive instant response as well. The CellScope can be clipped easily to the cell phone with the help of a modified belt clip. A set of high brightness white LEDs are responsible for providing the illumination. These LEDs draws their power from the battery attached to the device. The CellScope can be angled so as to illuminate any sample fully at its focal point.
The team believes that if mass produced, the device could be sold for around $50, an incredible price for a clinical quality microscope that can send diagnostic data all over the world.

The CellScope has been awarded with a cash prize of $100,000 in the Intel INSPIRE EMPOWER Challenge and was also a winner of Vodafone Americas Foundation Wireless Innovation Project. But this is not the end as research team is constantly testing the device rigorously so as to come up with some advance version of it. The cash prize would be used in the improvement of the device, as planned by the research team members.

You tube video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J_44YIAGpf4