Yes, you read that right.
If you own any phone with a capacitive touchscreen (such as an iPhone, many Android handsets, and a whole host of Windows phones as well), then your handset could actually be used to analyse both blood and saliva, it turns out.
How? Well frankly, we have no idea:- but a group of South Korean scientists have today announced that any capacitive screen can be used to diagnose various blood-borne diseases, or at least that it is possible.
Essentially, the good doctors have announced that using these screens they have managed to identify the presence of biomolecules in a substance, now all they need to do is work out how to identify what those cells are accurately.
Unfortunately, this point is where the iPhone screen fails a little bit: basically, in order to identify these molecules, modifications will have to be made.
The plan is to create “a film covered in a substance which can selectively react to certain biomolecules so that we can determine what those biomolecules are” – and at this point, we’re in a world that we simply have no understanding of, not being hugely intelligent South Korean scientists.
This idea is likely to be a new contender for something called the X-Prize; which is given to innovators in non-invasive methods of diagnosing cancer.
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