Phones keep you healthy

Far from posing a risk to health, mobile phones could soon be a lifeline, monitoring user breath and saliva, or ‘sniffing’ the environment and communicating information to central databases, at the discretion of the user. All the technologies are in place, working prototypes of the phones and the associated sensors and databases can be seen; all that is needed now is the will and the money to put it together. Mooted applications range from nationwide monitoring of air pollution, to detecting the onset of epidemics, both human and animal, through to teenagers worrying about bad breath. The nearest anyone has come to realising any of these ideas so far is a set of working prototype phones and a database developed by BlueAid, a Cambridge start-up, directed by Bill Munday, who used the recent Medical Innovation Forum at London’s Olympia Conference Centre to demonstrate his prototype phone platforms. He sees the most promising target application as maintaining good health, “but it’s got to be easy to set up with no more than two clicks”, he says. According to Munday, he has access to backroom server software that could handle 6 billion sets of records, representing the entire population of the planet. In his demonstration, the user called up a diagnosis function, represented by a pulsing icon, upon which the phone would make measurements (that might include body temperature, heart rate and breathing rate), offer advice and then ask if the caller wanted to be connected to his/her doctor’s surgery, which would first receive the data from the phone and then make a person-to-person connection. The doctor or nurse might then request that the user take a picture and send it, or make an appointment to come in. Attendees at Munday’s seminar seemed to think first commercial target applications should be minor teenage ailments – problems such as bad breath or incipient skin problems. By using solid state sensors built into the microphone assembly, it would be relatively easy to implement. Researchers at the University of Cambridge have two families of advanced sensors that would be appropriate. Munday, however, has in mind more life-critical applications, such as monitoring heart problems and diabetes, where sensing technologies have also been well developed – see Eureka’s April 2007 cover feature story about wireless connected heart monitoring patches. Munday says that for health monitoring in Third World countries, the cost of a £140 mobile phone sent to a village in Africa “is a small fraction of the typical £40,000 cost of sending in a medical monitoring team”. He also sees a possible market in drug companies supplying phones as part of drug trial monitoring programmes. The phone could be programmed to tell patients when to take remedies, monitor whether they have done so and then transmit the patient bio function results to the monitoring system. In an alternative approach, the US company Gentag co-owns Motorola patent 7,148,803 Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) Based Sensor Networks and has a concept of RFID sensors integrated in low-cost diagnostic devices, such as ‘Smart’ disposable wireless skin patches or personal drug delivery systems that could be read directly by the phone. The company also owns patent 7,109,859 covering the combination of mobile phones with removable sensor modules for consumer, medical, industrial and Homeland Security applications. A particular focus of their patent 7,109,859 is an asthma prevention cell phone for users suffering from multiple chemical sensitivities – and even a radiation detector. Cambridge researchers have been active in environmental monitoring, too, using mobile phones and sensors on a pilot scale. Dr Eiman Kanjo from the Cambridge Computer Laboratory described a project using children to measure environmental noise as they walked home from school. With chemical sensors, every citizen with a phone could become a pollution environmental monitor, with central systems able to rapidly warn the entire population of any developing hazard. Pointers * Programmable phones are commercially available and software has been developed to allow them to be used in a user-friendly way and communicate with large capacity databases * Very low powered chemical or body function sensing technology for use with such phones is either in development or commercially available as pre-production samples * All that remains now is to find the investment and the will to put it all together, and offer working systems to the public