Devices

Clinic in a Cellphone

CellScope turns an ordinary camera phone into a powerful fluorescence microscope that can diagnose diseases such as tuberculosis. For the developing world and rural areas lacking any sort of infrastructure, this tiny, portable, inexpensive device amounts to a healthcare clinic.

The device contains microscope optics and a holder for blood samples on glass slides. It uses cheap optical filters and LEDs instead of the expensive, high-power, gas-filled lamps used in standard fluorescence microscopes. Yet, it can show things a small as a millionth of a meter. With the filters removed, it works as a normal optical microscope, able to show (for example) identifiable malaria parasites and sickle cells.

The cellphone part of this setup provides more than just the lens and camera. Today’s cellphones have enough computing power to run diagnostic applications, and of course they have the means to communicate results.

A future version of CellScope could also have a projector built in as part of the cellphone. The first projector-equipped cellphone was unveiled by Samsung earlier this year, producing good video images at up to 50 inches diagonal in a darkened room. Another “pico-projector” uses lasers, for allegedly even better results. And another in development projects touch-sensitive holograms.

Self-Powered Devices

If the “clinic-in-a-cellphone” did not need batteries, which are hard to find in remote areas, that would be icing on the cake. It is indeed theoretically possible for a cellphone, laptop, or other electronic device to dispense with batteries and instead “harvest” power from ambient sound waves, by exploiting the properties of piezoelectric material manufactured at nanoscale. Nokia is developing a prototype cellphone that achieves nearly the same effect using ambient radio waves to keep the battery topped up in standby mode. Nokia says it could bring a product to market within three to four years.

Witricity has already demonstrated cellphones (a Google G1 phone and an Apple iPhone) and televisions that receive power wirelessly, though not from ambient sources. Its approach exploits the resonance of low frequency electromagnetic waves transmitted between coils placed in nearby electrical sockets and in the device (cellphone, TV, etc.)

Other efforts to harvest energy, some reported more than 18 months ago, include a knee brace that can generate enough energy to power a mobile phone for 30 minutes from one minute of walking, “heel-strike” generators implanted in soldier’s boots creating power through the pumping motion of a footstep, a backpack that converts movement into electrical energy, and a nano-engineered garment fabric that also generates electrical energy from movement.

One way or another, we are approaching a more perfect wireless world, requiring neither communication wires nor power cables. That means more permanent connectivity.

Shrunken MRI

The clinic-in-a-cellphone might one day be supplemented by an inexpensive, portable MRI, if the US National Institute of Standards and Technology succeeds in its 18-month-old project to develop low-power atomic magnetometers (magnetic sensors) the size of a grain of rice yet almost as sensitive as the large, expensive sensors used in MRI machines.

Not only would this make MRI available to patients who could hitherto not afford it, or who could not find an MRI machine in their locality, but also to patients with pacemakers or other metallic implants who cannot be exposed to the powerful magnets of regular MRIs.

Bionic Eyes

“The latest generation of retinal implants has shown striking promise in tests involving a handful of blind patients,” wrote Duncan Graham-Rowe in Technology Review on September 29. “The implants have enabled many subjects to recognize objects and obstacles and given one person the ability to read large print. Such advances mark a turning point after decades of slow progress. And experts now say that commercial devices may be just a couple of years away.”

Results from several long-term studies were presented at a mid-September Artificial Vision symposium in Germany. Trials of the Argus II retinal implant, which has 60 electrodes enabling vision of large objects such as doors, were so promising that the company is preparing for market in Europe. An earlier-stage trial of another implant with 1,500 electrodes enabled a patient to read eight-centimeter-high letters, albeit with the assistance of a large magnifier.

Last year, the Boston Retinal Implant Project tested in pigs a device to overcome inflammation and other problems that are caused by implants intended to stimulate healthy nerve cells connected to the retinas of patients with retinal diseases such as acute macular degeneration and retinitis pigmentosa. The implant receives power (wirelessly, of course!) from a microcontroller located on the side of the eye. In its current form, the implant can reproduce only a 15-pixel image, but the group hopes to get up to 1,000 pixels eventually.

There is still a long way to go before full vision, or even the ability to recognize faces or to read, can be achieved, and while artificial retinas are some way from approval for use in humans, VisionCare Ophthalmic Technologies’ miniature telescope implanted into the eye to prevent vision loss from end-stage macular degeneration was recommended for approval by an FDA panel in April. In trials, it improved vision by about three and a half lines on an eye chart. The device is implanted in only one eye to provide detailed vision. The untreated eye handles peripheral vision. That apparently takes some getting used to.

A Selection of Other Devices

Muscle Scanner

A prototype, handheld, “electric impedance myograph” (EIM) under development painlessly and non-invasively measures electrical impedance in the muscle. Impedance changes depending on the health of the tissue. The device could replace electromyography (EMG), an uncomfortable needle test for muscle degeneration, and is being tested in patients with ALS and in children with spinal muscular atrophy.

Measuring Cerebral Blood Flow in Stroke Patients

A prototype noninvasive optical device has been demonstrated to reliably monitor cerebral blood flow, blood-oxygen saturation, and hemoglobin concentration in patients with acute stroke and other brain disorders. The device’s optical probes are placed over major cortical blood vessels in each hemisphere of the brain. Diffuse correlation spectroscopy does the monitoring and provides functional information to physicians and nurses.

Ultrasound Breast Cancer Detector

An ultrasound breast imaging machine under development at the Karmanos Cancer Institute (with which the Detroit Medical Center, this publication’s sponsor, is affiliated) is as good as mammography and traditional ultrasound, and potentially even MRI, at detecting tumors, reports Megha Satyanarayana in the Detroit Free Press.

The “Computerized Ultrasound Risk Evaluation” (CURE) system has undergone phase I clinical trials among 240 women with such success that the developers have applied for expedited approval from the Food and Drug Administration. Being inexpensive, painless, and radiation-free, CURE can monitor tumors more frequently than extant imaging methods.

CURE is also being tested to monitor whether chemotherapy is shrinking tumors in a patient. If so, it could replace MRI for that purpose.

Artificial Organelle to Create Artificial Heparin

Heparin is present naturally in the body and is widely used to prevent blood from clotting during medical procedures. The drug was discovered 90 years ago, but because it has proved extremely difficult to synthesize, it is still made from pig intestines. An artificial cellular organelle is now being used to better understand how the human body makes heparin. Researchers hope this will lead to bioengineered heparin entering clinical trials within the next five years.

Conformable Display

Organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs) and organic transistors embedded in a new rubbery conductor (a mix of carbon nanotubes and rubber) result in a flexible display that can be placed over a curved surface, folded in half, crumpled up, and (this is key) stretched to more than twice its original size, while still displaying an image. And since the whole ensemble can be rolled out on a printing press, the result could be large, cheap, wearable displays and electronics, and sensitive artificial skin for robots or prosthetic limbs.

Energy

Cold Fusion: On Again

Cold fusion has been in the dumps since the Fleischmann and Pons debacle of 1989, but at a demonstration to 60 physicists and reporters in May last year a Japanese researcher plausibly claimed to have made the first successful demonstration of cold fusion. The world is waiting for the experiment to be reproduced, before declaring victory.

Meanwhile, the US Navy also reported clear evidence of cold fusion, in March this year.

It would seem premature to dismiss cold fusion out of hand. In the face of climate change and oil depletion, we may need it.