Have you ever really considered the leap from one technology to another? Have you ever wondered what the future of healthcare will be? Will Jarvis report my cholesterol to me in the morning?
One day, I hope we will be shocked to hear about a time when people put needles into your arm and called it healthcare – and I’m not even squeamish about that sort of thing. But it’s just not something that anyone likes to do. A necessary evil, right? Waiting Rooms can go, too. We all hate them, we voted, and now they’re gone.
I wish.
Well, I heard something fascinating in a course on infectious disease. In 2016, an NIH grant was awarded to Cornell University for developing something they are calling the “fever phone.”[1] This device is apparently no larger than a coffee maker, but it analyzes labs for a plethora of infectious diseases that can be read on a smart phone. This is amazing, because it’s tough to maintain electronic machinery when electricity is not dependable, and the versatility of a smart phone that runs on battery is much more friendly to some of the difficult environments where fast results can be life-saving.
Personally, I’d like to move directly to the sensing spectrometer version where there are no needlesticks, but I digress, and this innovation does still require laboratory blood draws.
However, the researchers said something fascinating: They decided that it was better to leap to the latest technology rather than work through all the intermediaries.
By Gayle Porter
