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The device you’re looking at is called the Scanadu SCOUT and, basically, it’s a medical tricorder that will give you precise vital information about any human being within seconds, just on contact. I tried it myself, and knew I was looking at the beginning of a personal health revolution. Star Trek-level stuff. Except it’s coming at the end of 2013.
And it’s not only SCOUT — the company has two other devices — ScanaFlo and ScanaFlu — which are like having your own medical labs to go. Best of all, those two are so cheap that they are disposable.
SCOUT will not be disposable, though. The unit is a tiny hardware device that reads your vital health information on contact. You simply place it on the left temple and, in less than ten seconds, it will read your pulse transit time, heart rate, electrical heart activity, temperature, heart rate variability and blood oxygenation. Then it sends this information to an app on your iPhone or Android phone, which displays it for you. You can even store your vitals for tracking, which could prove fundamental to many health situations at home.
Watching SCOUT at work was something almost magical, like having one of those giant health monitoring units reduced to a slice of plastic that fits on the palm of your hand. Which, actually, is exactly how it became to be.
I talked with Walter de Brouwer, the Belgian genius who founded Scanadu after working at MIT and on several high profile tech projects, including One Laptop Per Child. A few years ago, Walter’s own kid ended up in the intensive care unit of a hospital. Frustrated with the complicated devices that monitored his child’s health, he started to think about how could all of this information be turned into something that normal people could understand. He tinkered around in the ICU and became so knowledgeable that he eventually was assisting some of the nurses there, who often would get confused themselves.
Walter thought that there was a need for something that would be able to monitor anyone’s health, anywhere, with ease and at low cost. He thought about instantaneous vital readings, molecular diagnostics, visualisation, and storage of personal health data all wrapped in an easy-to-use device that would connect to your smartphone or tablet to show you all the information you could need in a simple way. Not only for yourself, but for remote assistance too.
Most probably, Walter had watched too much Star Trek in his college years. He wanted to make a tricorder. So he did.
At first, he thought it was possible. In fact, there are other teams who are working in similar projects to win Qualcomm’s Tricorder X-Prize Competition, or the Nokia Sensing Challenge. So what if all had failed so far?
So Walter started to work on what would become SCOUT, ScanaFlo and ScanaFlu. He assembled four teams of specialists at the NASA Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California. Each team — engineers, chemists, doctors, mathematicians and software engineers — worked together to come up with new, smart ways not only to monitor vitals, but to detect actual infections within seconds. According to Walter, they use all the tricks in the book: imaging and sound analysis, molecular diagnostics and data analytics, all combed by “a suite of algorithms to create devices that offer a comprehensive, real-time picture of your health data.”
SCOUT is its first product. This personal health tricorder is so simple that it will cost around £100-odd when it appears at the end of 2013, after it gets government approval. It may very well become as ubiquitous as home thermometers, which were introduced the 19th century. In fact, says Walter, that’s the whole point :
Consumers don’t have the tools they need to monitor their health and make informed decisions about when they’re actually sick and need to see a doctor. We want to empower consumers to take control of their health and give them direct access to their personal healthfeed.
Judging from what I saw, SCOUT may be exactly that.
Along with SCOUT, I saw two other products that were even more impressive: ScanaFlu and ScanaFlo. I couldn’t get photos of them — they are still in a rough prototype stage — but they are easy enough to visualise.
For ScanaFlo, imagine a disposable blue plastic rectangle with a QR code and a window that reveals paper swatches and a colour calibration target (similar to this). To get a reading, you need to pee on the rectangle as one would on a pregnancy test. Depending on the content of your urine, the swatches change colour.
But what do these colour changes mean? You don’t have to guess or remember. Point your smartphone at the QR target and it will take a photo, telling you if it detects anything out of the ordinary based on the hue of the paper swatches, which react differently depending on your health status. According its creators, ScanaFlo tests for “pregnancy complications, preeclampsia, gestational diabetes, kidney failure and urinary tract infections.”
ScanaFlu works in a similar way. Instead of a rectangle, it’s a square with a small protuberance on which you have to spit. Your saliva will be distributed to different test units using tiny nano-vessels. Incredibly enough, this “disposable cartridge will provide early detection for Strep A, Influenza A, Influenza B, Adenovirus and RSV.” Like ScanaFlo, you use your phone’s camera to have a result sent to your app.
These disposable systems will be sold in packs, also at the end of 2013.
I’m not a hypochondriac, but it’s not hard to see the importance of these devices. While being able to monitor your own health would never eliminate the need for doctors, it could do wonders for everyone’s well-being. These cheap devices will keep track of your own health but, as I discussed with Scanadu’s founder, they can also be easily used to detect infection outbreaks at a national or global level, with people anonymously uploading data to a cloud. The Centre for Disease Control or the World Health Organisation can literally keep their fingers on the pulse of the entire planet. The possibilities are truly endless. No wonder Stephen Wolfram is one of their advisors. If they are successful, I can’t wait to see what people can do with all this anonymous data.
If these gadgets can really provide you with instantaneous feedback about your health status for such a low price, this will be the beginning of something much bigger. The monetary savings in prevention alone — and not depending on expensive laboratories for many tests — makes it all worthwhile.
But even more exciting is the potential for increasing the accuracy of diagnostics, based on the tracking of data over time. As Dr. Alan Greene, Chief Medical Officer at Scanadu, says:
When it comes to health, averages don’t cut it. Vitals change throughout the day and vary from person to person, so it makes no sense to assume we are all the same. Health decision shouldn’t be based on averages, they should be based on a real, accurate and personalised healthfeed of data, which we now have the power to give to the consumer in the palm of their hand.
Indeed. The future looks good. I’m ready for this, Dr. Bones.
Another scientist inspired by Star Trek…final frontier stuff
Neat devices. However, instead of making them disposable, why not make them robust enough to survive a decent amount of time? We have enough ‘disposable’ electronic what nots filling up landfills, thank you.
Designers take note. Build more stuff that lasts or make it as near as dammit 100% recyclable.
/mini rant over/
They aren’t disposeable other than the small plastic squares and triangles. Who wants to keep something they just pissed or spat on?
Do you really want something you urinate or spit on to be reusable? Imagine the hygiene issues if people didn’t clean them properly.
Must refresh before commenting.
I don’t think either of you know what’s disposable and what isn’t on this device seeing as how you haven’t seen it. And I stand by the comment I made. We need less crap in our lives, particularly stuff that lets joe pub play doctor. I’d be more impressed if these devices were for doctors to use.
Or maybe you like drowning in un-recyclable crap?
You can’t recycle the device because the chemical has already reacted. A glucose monitor can be reused because the plastic bit is just a potentiometer, while the strip itself contains all of the active ingredients. While the article doesn’t explain how the device works, it’s probably a cocktail of biomolecules that reacts with various chemical compounds in your urine. A colour change would indicate that the molecules have already reacted with the compounds. Even if the reaction is reversible, you will find it very difficult to wash the compounds away – the device most likely utilises tiny capillaries to capture the urine.
If the device has to be reusable, instead of capillaries you will need large visible holes to inject the urine into. This would increase the size of the device and also the cost. So like you said, only clinics and hospitals will be able to afford this stuff, and they probably already have something similar.
The reason why personal medical diagnostic devices is important is that the average joe doesn’t have time to go to a doctor’s clinic. A lot of people in this world work more than 10 hours a day and 6 days a week, with little if any annual leave. Therefore, they won’t seek medical help until the symptoms have become very severe, at which point it might be too late. If we can deliver cheap disposable devices to their hands, they can perform the diagnostic without needing to visit a doctor, and potentially save the public medical infrastructure a lot of money (the later a disease is identified, the more it will cost to cure it).
The idea that people work more than 10 hours a day six days a week is no excuse for such a device. I’d say that if that was your lifestyle, enjoy your upcoming body crash. No gizmo will help you out.
Half the reason why we produce such waste is our own laziness. It has to be curbed.
How about the fact doctors are inundated with idiots and hypochondriacs who go to the doctor for a minor cold, wasting time and money? Also, what the hell do you think produces more waste, using one of these or driving however many miles it is to the doctors to use THEIR disposable test kit, since they will inevitably use these? Stop being obtuse.
No.
Most of the people in Asia who work 10 hours a day don’t choose to do so. They simply have to, else they lose their job (fun fact: they get paid for only 7.5 hours a day). In China, there’s a popular saying that roughly translates to “I have time for death but not sickness”.
Sorry to piss on the parade but there’s nothing here which is actually particularly new or useful.
So the SCOUT reads “…your pulse transit time, heart rate, electrical heart activity, temperature, heart rate variability and blood oxygenation”.
Great. Of all of those things, the only clinically useful measurements are the heart rate, temperature and blood oxygenation (sats). “Electrical hear activity”? What? How do you measure electrical heart activity when the heart isn’t under the temple? We already have a way of doing this: it’s called an ECG, and it is infinitely more accurate and useful than anything you stick on your head. I couldn’t diagnose any heart problems from this thing.
What else? Oh, heart rate variability? Great. Heart rates vary naturally with inspiration and expiration (try it yourself) and has pretty much no use clinically.
So this is just a normal sats probe (which does heart rate already, incidentally) combined with a thermometer. £100? Bargain. (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Contec-Full-Colour-Oximeter-Analysis-Software/dp/B003LY6P8I)
What else do we have here? A magic QR code that changes according to what’s in your urine and gives you a diagnosis of “pregnancy complications, preeclampsia, gestational diabetes, kidney failure and urinary tract infections”?
Sorry, no. These already exist, and in a much simpler, MUCH more informative fashion. This is just a confused and more complicated way of arranging a standard, cheap, urine dipstick, which instead of using a reader (available in pretty much every hospital ward, and accurately reads the changes in colour to give an accurate amount of each urine component) uses a mobile phone (which, as QR codes contain binary information, can only state roughly whether a test is positive or negative, and pretty useless clinically).
“But it diagnoses pregnancy complications, preeclampsia, gestational diabetes, kidney failure and urinary tract infections!” Again, no. It gives the urine contents, like any other dipstick (things like glucose, nitrites, leukocytes, ph, etc) and the doctor makes the diagnosis, based on the results and the clinical picture. Half of you reading this will have protein in your urine, which based on other symptoms can either be a totally normal thing or actually-quite-a-bad-thing.
The last one? Yes, I can see some use in that. No, wait, no I can’t. Why would you want to pick any of those things up? It won’t change your management of the patient and is just another expensive test. Someone comes in with an upper respiratory tract infection/tonsillitis/etc? You can make the diagnosis and start treating simply on the clinical picture – bacterial illness is subtly different from viral illness but most clinicians can pick it up. And if it’s viral (everything in that list except Strep A is a virus) there’s no point in knowing which virus is causing it because your management is going to be the same either way.
Big Pharma loves churning this shit out and then sending attractive representatives to all the hospitals to chat up the inexperienced junior doctors and persuade them to use their expensive products which actually don’t do much at all. All this stuff is expensive tat.
Not magic.
I agree with most of what you wrote. However, as you mentioned normally you would need a doctor to make a diagnostic based on the what other stuff you have in your urine. When a doctor does this, he’s using what he has learnt in school, which is really set a set of rules, i.e. an algorithm. If we input this algorithm into a computing device, the patient can decide for himself whether he needs to go see a doctor.
Algorithms are helpful in some cases, yes, but they are rarely diagnostic. Doctors do a lot more than just run algorithms – that’s why we still have doctors, that’s why they still train people to be doctors, rather than just making people learn how to use an algorithm computer.
We always talk about ‘classical presentations’ in medicine – i.e. appendicitis presenting with stabbing pain in the right of the hip. Want to know a secret? Most patient’s DON’T present with all, or sometimes any, of the classic symptoms of a disease, which is where doctors use their training and experience to make a diagnosis.
Case in point: If you go out for a run and slap this thing on you, it will tell you to go and see a doctor, because you’ll be hot, and your heart will be racing.
So much great stuff was invented because of the ‘old’ Star Trek (mobile phones, tablets and such) What will the ‘new’ version of Star Trek bring us? Lens Flare.