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1. #THE NEXT BIG THING IN CELL PHONE TECHNOLOGY PORTABLE#
2. #THE NEXT BIG THING IN CELL PHONE TECHNOLOGY SOFTWARE#

If we wanted to develop an application for, say, the Samsung Galaxy S4, we need to know that it would still be available in its current guise for at least the next five years. In diagnostic applications, however, stability is a major requirement. This is, of course, at the heart of the business model for providers and carriers.

#THE NEXT BIG THING IN CELL PHONE TECHNOLOGY SOFTWARE#

Ironically, one of the biggest barriers to the development of cell phone-based technologies is the rapid rate at which cell phones are evolving in terms of the hardware and software that they use. Once this and other devices gain regulatory approval, it’s not hard to imagine the rapid rise of “off-the-shelf” consumer products for a number of different applications from health monitoring to food analysis. Such cell phone-based systems can quantify analytes at concentrations in the parts-per-million or even parts-per-billion range, depending on the test of interest. For example, I cofounded a company called Holomic LLC ( see sidebar “ Introducing Holomic”) that develops devices to image and quantify lateral flow immunochromatographic assays. There are commercially available applications and hardware to convert cell phones into laboratory instruments. One of the next steps is commercialization and deployment of existing instruments and designs, and it’s already happening to a degree. Virus or DNA imaging is no simple task, so it is a real milestone that proves the worth of our approach and the potential that the technology has in areas besides pathology, for instance environmental monitoring or materials science. Admittedly, these cell phones are very high end, but they have enabled us to expand the boundaries of mobile imaging, sensing and diagnostics.

We can now routinely see single viruses, sub-100-nanometer fluorescent particles and even single DNA molecules using cell phone-based microscopes.

#THE NEXT BIG THING IN CELL PHONE TECHNOLOGY PORTABLE#

So if, like me, you’re a researcher who’s interested in developing portable high-end microscopes, the constant improvement in cell phone performance offers regular opportunities to push for more and more functionality. The megapixel count of cell phones has been doubling every two years for the last 10 years (from 0.2 to more than 40 megapixels). Let me illustrate exactly how cheap this technology has become: if you were to somehow magically remove three zeros from either the number of cell phones sold or the number of subscribers (that is to say, replace billion with million), the cell phone in your pocket would cost you the same amount as a high-end car. The sheer economy of scale and fight for market share have driven unprecedented strides in technological advancement and capability at amazingly low cost. In such countries, cell phones are the most advanced technology that you will encounter phone towers, communication networks, and mobile power stations for charging cell phones appear to have found their way into every corner of the globe.Ĭell phones are extremely cost-effective. The numbers are simply staggering: more than 15 billion cell phones have been sold and there are currently seven billion cell phone subscribers worldwide, more than 75 percent of whom are in developing countries – despite a lack of basic infrastructure or even roads in some cases. No one could have predicted the current status of mobile telecommunications 10 or 15 years ago.