The Cellphone That Could Change the World

Wired wrote yesterday about a cell-phone modification that could bring on-the-spot disease detection and monitoring to even the most remote corners of the world. The phone has its lens removed and modified with an LED light source that reveals particular properties of the blood when lit. The camera sensor can then image the blood, creating a diagnostic lab all in a cell phone.

From Wired:

UCLA researcher Dr. Aydogan Ozcan images thousands of blood cells instantly by placing them on an off-the-shelf camera sensor and lighting them with a filtered-light source (coherent light, for you science buffs). The filtered light exposes distinctive qualities of the cells, which are then interpreted by Ozcan's custom software. By analyzing the cell types present in a much larger sample, a more accurate diagnosis can be made in a matter of minutes. No more sending blood away to a lab and waiting days or weeks for the results.

So imagine this.

It's 2011, and a lot has changed in our approach to global health promotion. First, we've established a Department of Development that recognizes that prevention goes a lot further than treatment, and has begun to make strategic investments in technology and training around the world. Michael Kleinman is the director, with Paul Farmer as his Senior Adviser, of course. One of the early initiatives was the promotion of a global health corps which was focused on training community health workers, the backbone of most health systems. To enable even more effective home care, these community health workers have cell-phones outfitted with the LUCAS mobile test system above, and use Ushahidi and FrontlineSMS technology to immediately send results to a global epidemiological database from which regional and international teams can analyze trends in disease prevalence. Nonprofits and national agencies consult with the doctors monitoring the global database to design interventions that strategically head-off possible epidemics. Meanwhile, pharmaceutical companies who have negotiated lower rates with national governments, mediated by partners like the Clinton Foundation, employ a partnership with Coca-Cola to use their delivery trucks to get life saving drugs to even the most inaccessible regions. And of course, patients being treated can use their own cheap mobile phones to send messages to health workers about updates in their condition.

Sounds like fantasy? It's not. Everything above is happening or being discussed. The actors are corporate, nonprofit, and government. All it will take is the right collaboration, predicated on a common sense of moral outrage and an understanding of our immense opportunity to create a healthier world.

Update: Based on the incredible discussion going on below, I'll be linking to people's follow-on posts from the main article:

• Phone's Don't Change the World, People Do - Eduardo Jezierski/InSTEDD.
  A truly spectacular post that will teach you more about this field as well as push you to re-frame the question: "Scalability is context-specific; and measured by how well you grow with your users’ needs."
• Preventing Famine With a Mobile - Katrin Verclas/MobileActive.
  This post actually wasn't a response to the wired story (her coverage of the story, with great additional details, is here) but is so in line with this conversation that its definitely worth a link. Its a review of a deployment of RapidSMS and its impact on famine prevention in Ethiopia.
• The Future of Mobile Apps, Hope, and Why Pro-Poor Won't Work - Katrin Verclas/MobileActive.
  Another great tome from Katrin at MobileActive, which picks up on a thread for this conversation and suggests that none of the applications we've discussed have been developed alongside their intended users. I can't speak for most of the platforms, but I do know this has been a priority for Ushahidi and that the Appfrica project, while young, is founded upon it. But the point is still important: in the long run, our excitement about the power of mobile relates to its power as a leveling, equaling force, and our design processes need to reflect that.
• The Mobile Manifesto - Joe Edelman
  One of the commentors, inspired by the conversation, writes up his own 'manifesto' regarding the power of mobile technology to answer some of societies problems.