Health & Wellbeing

smartCARD lets users check their cholesterol via an iPhone

smartCARD lets users check their cholesterol via an iPhone
Graduate students Matthew Mancuso (left) and Vlad Oncescu, with the smartCARD
Graduate students Matthew Mancuso (left) and Vlad Oncescu, with the smartCARD
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The smartCARD attaches over top of the phone's camera, and has a slot in it which receives a standard test strip
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The smartCARD attaches over top of the phone's camera, and has a slot in it which receives a standard test strip
Graduate students Matthew Mancuso (left) and Vlad Oncescu, with the smartCARD
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Graduate students Matthew Mancuso (left) and Vlad Oncescu, with the smartCARD

Although a lot of people are concerned about monitoring their cholesterol levels, probably not many of those people want to head off to a clinic or use an expensive, complicated device to get those levels tested every few days. Soon, however, they may not have to. Scientists from Cornell University have developed a gadget called the smartCARD, that allows users to easily check their own cholesterol using their iPhone.

The smartCARD (smartphone Cholesterol Application for Rapid Diagnostics) attaches over top of the phone's camera, and has a slot in it which receives a standard test strip.

The smartCARD attaches over top of the phone's camera, and has a slot in it which receives a standard test strip
The smartCARD attaches over top of the phone's camera, and has a slot in it which receives a standard test strip

Users place a drop of their blood on that strip, which causes the strip to change color in response to biomarkers present in the sample. Once the strip is fed into the device, a built-in flash evenly illuminates it while the phone's camera snaps its picture.

An accompanying app then performs a colorimetric analysis of the image, and is able to provide an exact cholesterol reading. The whole process is said to take about a minute.

Lead scientist David Erickson claims that although the device is ready to commercialize in its current form, the team wants to develop it further first. For instance, so far it can only measure total cholesterol, although work is under way to get it to differentiate between both "good" and "bad" cholesterol.

A paper on the research was recently published in the journal Lab on a Chip.

Source: Cornell University

2 comments
2 comments
BigGoofyGuy
I think that is really neat.
I wonder if one could do the same thing but for checking blood sugar levels?
Joris van den Heuvel
How is this different than comparing the color change strip against a color scale marked with cholesterol values, for yourself?
Do people really need to have their iphone involved before they buy this?
I, for one, put more trust in my own eyes' color accuracy than a phone camera.