Improving Disease Monitoring in Remote Locations: Study

First Posted: Nov 29, 2013 08:39 PM EST
Close

A recent report from the American Chemical Society's (ACS') award-winning Global Challenges/Chemistry solutions discusses the advances of monitoring devices in remote locations that could potentially save a patients' health. This development works to convert smartphones into powerful mini-miscropes that can detect individual viruses. 

Researchers note that in places with limited resources, many medical professionals may not always have an option to prepare work properly. In order to better address this issue, scientists have developed compact microscopes that can be used to fit smartphones and detect microbes or check a patient's eye sight. Ozcan's team, in fact, set out to develop such working via an image device that can count the number of bacteria or viruses in a sample. 

Resutls showed a portable imaging system that can harness the digital power of today's smartphones in order to detect individual viruses and determine viral load. The researchers conclude that the microscpe "holds significant promise for various point-of-care applications such as viral load measurements or other biomedical tests conducted in remote or resource-limited environments," via a press release

More information regarding the study can be found via the journal ACS Nano.

Global Challenges/Chemistry Solutions is a series of podcasts describing some of the 21st century's most daunting problems, and how cutting-edge research in chemistry matters in the quest for solutions. Global Challenges is the centerpiece in an alliance on sustainability between ACS and the Royal Society of Chemistry. Global Challenges is a sweeping panorama of global challenges that includes dilemmas such as providing a hungry and thirsty world with ample supplies of safe food and clean water, developing alternatives to petroleum to fuel society, preserving the environment and ensuring a sustainable future for our children and improving human health. 

See Now: NASA's Juno Spacecraft's Rendezvous With Jupiter's Mammoth Cyclone

©2017 ScienceWorldReport.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. The window to the world of science news.

Join the Conversation

Real Time Analytics