Officials with the Nokia Sensing X Challenge have announced the second grand prize winner in their competition—DNA Medicine Institute (DMI) has won for its cutting edge medical testing device, the rHEALTH X. The team has received $525,000 in prize money and an enormous amount of publicity and prestige.
The Reusable Handheld Electrolyte and Lab Technology for Humans (rHEALTH) X is a portable handheld device that can currently conduct up to 22 lab tests (up to the FDA gold standard) from a single drop of blood. In accepting the award, representatives with DMI said that while winning the prize is great, their real objective is to bring modern medicine to the billions of people who currently have little access to medical care.
The lab tests done by the X run the gamut, from tox screening, to looking for signals in the blood that indicate diseases, to discovering the presence of viruses, such as flu or Ebola. To allow for testing with such a small device, the researchers developed new technology to test blood samples–it relies on nanotechnology and optics. The testing surface is seeded with many nano-sized test strips, each of which mix with and soak up material found in the blood. Each strip is then lined up and passed in front of a laser which is used to determine what material is in it. Findings are stored and displayed, allowing non-medically trained people to make their own diagnoses. The device also comes with a Bluetooth enabled patch to be applied to the skin which can provide respiration, heart rate etc. to a person on their smartphone.
http://phys.org/news/2014-11-dmi-nokia-handheld-medical-device.html
[More Info]: http://sensing.xprize.org/press-release/dmi-wins-nokia-sensing-xchallenge-sensor-runs-hundreds-of-lab-tests-single
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 13 2014, @01:13PM
Fortunately it is not transmitted over the internet.
(Score: 1) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 13 2014, @01:18PM
Systemd, a disease that's more harmful than Ebola, is transmitted over the Internet, however.
Ebola has never prevented my Debian system from booting properly. Systemd has, on several occasions.