This is a health care assistant that Fidel Castro could only have dreamed of. Like the smartphone is the computer for the final six billion, this device is the doctor for the final three billion, or maybe six. And I am sure there will be improvements. It is awesome as is, and it will get better. Finally a health "app" that actually does something serious pretty fast.
Heck, this is not just something for the have nots. This will displace many mainstream devices currently in use. This has the ease of a good old thermometer.
This Device Diagnoses Hundreds of Diseases Using a Single Drop of Blood
a portable handheld device that can diagnose hundreds of diseases using a single drop of blood with what Chan claims is gold-standard accuracy. ..... First hatched by DMI in response to a NASA challenge to create a diagnostics device that could work even in space, rHEALTH was portable from the beginning. ..... One small drop of blood is dropped into a small receptacle, where nanostrips and reagents react to the blood’s contents. The whole cocktail then goes through a spiral micro-mixer and is streamed past lasers that use variations in light intensity and scattering to come up with a diagnosis, from flu to a more serious illness such as pneumonia—or even Ebola—within a few minutes. ..... There’s also a vitals patch that users can wear to get continuous health readings—EKG, heart rate, body temperature—delivered to their smartphone or the rHEALTH device itself via a Bluetooth link. An app called CHAS (Comprehensive Health Assessment Unit) can walk the user through the process of self-diagnosis. ....... getting all the diagnostics technologies packed together into one handheld device ..... patients will need to give 1,500 times less blood than they would for regular tests ..... the device has even been tested in simulated lunar and zero gravity. “It’s a symphony of innovations, but we’ve pushed all of them individually to create the device” ..... rHEALTH is reliable for cell counts, HIV detection, vitamin D levels, and various protein markers in the body. The next challenges .. are adding more tests, scaling up production, and going through the laborious process of getting the rHEALTH commercialized. ...... three different models: the rHEALTH One, which will be used for translational research; the rHEALTH X, meant to be used as a kind of power tool for clinicians; and the rHEALTH X1, which will be available for consumers. ...... The goal is to create a universal, Star Trek-inspired medical diagnostic tool that detects up to 16 separate health conditions
