(USA)
Healthcare is becoming more personalised and tech-driven.
Take the $550 ‘Swiss Army knife of biosensing’. Developed by a team from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the spectral transmission-reflectance-intensity (TRI)-Analyzer – to give it its technical name – attaches to a smartphone and reads blood, saliva and urine samples at a fraction of the costs of going to the clinic.
“Our TRI Analyzer is like the Swiss Army knife of biosensing. It’s capable of performing the three most common types of tests in medical diagnostics, so in practice, thousands of already-developed tests could be adapted to it,” said Bioengineering and Electrical & Computer Engineering Professor Brian Cunningham.
And this is the growing trend: healthcare on the go. Researchers from the University of Texas have developed a wearable diagnostic biosensor that can monitor diabetes from minuscule amounts of sweat. There are also wearables that can inform people when they are getting ill and others that help provide more personalised treatments for different diseases, including Parkinson’s.
