Toward the Pocket Doctor: South Koreans Perfecting Mobile Phone Medical Apps

As all of us spend more and more time with our mobile phones, it can be easy to be lulled into believing that all the great mobile applications have already been invented. However, many mobile analysts predict that one emerging application class for mobile phones has yet to come to full fruition: medical diagnostic applications.

The concept of the phone as doctor (where the doctor is always with you) may still be questionable for some people, since there aren't many applications to point to yet. But at the Advanced Institute of Science and Technology in South Korea, the first steps toward the phone that could detect cancer, diabetes and more are being taken. As this story plays out, open source medical diagnostic applications could have a bright future, too.

As The Register reports: "The work is being done in South Korea, where researchers at the Advanced Institute of Science and Technology have been spitting and bleeding onto capacitive touch screens to see what details they can extract from the samples using standard touchscreen tech...It is early days, but the researchers explained that they can spot the presence of biomolecules and must now attempt to identify what they are using a touchscreen..."