Core77

How a Doctor's Five-Minute, $15 iPhone Hack Could Affect 600 Million Lives

By Rain Noe - March 19, 2013

in Medical

Despite ubiquitous assurances that "There's an app for that," one thing not included in the "that" is the detection of soil-transmitted helminths in human beings. (Helminths are the scientific name for hookworms and their nasty little friends.) Hookworm is a particular problem in developing nations without access to proper medical screening facilities, and Dr. Isaac Bogoch, a Canadian internal medicine specialist, figured out a clever way to tackle that with an extraordinarily simple smartphone hack.

We transformed a mobile phone into a microscope by temporarily mounting a 3-mm ball lens (Edmund Optics, Barrington, NJ) to the camera of an iPhone 4S (Apple, Cupertino, CA) with double-sided tape (3M, St. Paul, MN)... A small hole was punctured in the middle of the double-sided tape, and the ball lens was positioned in this hole. The ball lens was then centered over the iPhone camera lens, with the tape holding the lens to the camera for stability.

Kato-Katz thick smear slides were directly placed up against the double-sided tape, such that a small space less than 1 mm separated the lens from the slide (Figure 1). The mobile phone microscope was placed on top of a slide, which was illuminated from below by a generic, small, handheld incandescent flashlight powered by one AA battery. Images were viewed on the mobile phone screen, and magnification was increased with the digital zoom function; we estimate that this method could achieve an equivalent of 50-60 u magnification. The microscopist manually manipulated the slide underneath the mobile phone microscope to examine the entire area of stool on the slide.

Dr. Bogoch then tested his hacked iPhone on samples taken from schoolchildren in Tanzania and achieved a detection rate accurate to 69.4%—not good enough to eradicate the problem, but certainly a promising start. Dr. Bogoch's research paper in the American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene [PDF] estimates the hack can be "easily assembled in less than 5 minutes at a cost of approximately US $15."

We know you're thinking "Doc, that is awesome—but you pressed your phone up against human poo?" Of course he didn't, the man is a doctor!

The thick double-sided tape (3M) that held the ball lens to the mobile phone provided a 1-mm buffer zone between the slide and ball lens. In addition, the cellophane strip placed over stool on the slide prevented the ball lens from becoming contaminated with stool.

Understandably, Apple, 3M, and lens manufacturer Edmunds Optics would probably be squeamish about running a commercial advertising Dr. Bogoch's accomplishment. But the health implications for this hack are not to be underestimated. Hookworms reportedly infect more than 600 million people around the globe.

If you've been searching for a socially important Kickstarter project, I'd say you reach out to Dr. Bogoch and get down to business.

o

Favorite This
Q
4

Comment

Comments

Robert

10 years ago

Z

Z

Reply

It's the hack that cost $15 not the iPhone; I think that is quite clear in the title. The idea is to make an adaptation to an iPhone for microscopy purposes, not to go and buy one and invite yourself to believe that it was better value than a microscope.

BB, by 'big pharma' I guess you mean companies like Merck that are providing free of charge all the drugs that will be needed to eliminate lymphatic filariasis, and GSK which is developing a vaccine against malaria, so fighting the disease rather than its symptoms. Maybe that isn't in Wikipedia
!Report as spam
Jason

11 years ago

Z

Z

Reply

Just to continue Sam's comment: I don't remember ever seeing an iPhone for under $15. Perhaps the focus should be on the fact that this could be done with almost any phone with a decent camera, and that the slides could be photographed or recorded on video, and sent around the world for further examination.
!Report as spam
Sam Harrell

11 years ago

Z

Z

Reply

Good effort. However, a locally available microscope costs less than an iPhone, does not require an external power source and ultimately has greater diagnostic usefulness.
!Report as spam
BB

11 years ago

Z

Z

Reply

Did you know that helminths actually keep people alive and able to live comfortably in the face of debilitating autoimmune disease (myself included)? Did you know that virtually no autoimmune diseases like asthma, autism, and Chrone's disease (amongst hundreds of others) don't exist in the developing world due to helminths?

I take issue with you saying "...for hookworms and their nasty little friends." We have sanitized our western world to the degree where beneficial parasites like helminths are all but gone. Humans lived in harmony with them for 10s of thousands of years and now without them many of us suffer tremendously. I infected myself 2 years ago and practically all my autoimmune diseases have disappeared where years of "modern" expensive medicine and pharma had failed.

The problem in the third world is that they get infected with high levels of helminths (they take a tiny amount of blood from you to live) coupled with malnutrition and other diseases to make it a problem. I have no issue with what this researcher is doing. Understanding the levels in the third world and people like myself is important. However, your statement of "not good enough to eradicate the problem" is absolutely not the goal. If we eradicated them you'd have an explosion of far worse diseases on masses of people. Control is the goal.

I respectfully ask you to edit your uninformed opinions expressed here as all it does in spread fear when legitimate scientists and doctors try and gain approval for this treatment by the FDA and others (still illegal due to this "fear" and big pharma fighting to save their billions on drugs that treat symptoms but not causes).

Read up before casting aspersions: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helminthic_therapy
!Report as spam