Smart Phones To Act As Low Cost Microscopes With Magnifying Optics

In a move to provide cheap diagnostic-quality microscopes for developing countries, bioengineers at University if California, Berkeley have designed equipment that can turn any standard smartphone into a microscope with 8x to 120x magnification. Since these images are stored in a smartphone the images can be viewed in real time, edited and sent to any other capable device for further analysis. In an initial experiment to test its viability the equipment, “CellScope” was provided to the students of San Francisco Friends School who used it in a project called as Micro:Macro. The students took macroscopic and macroscopic pictures of day to day objects and shared it among classmates and teachers for discussions. Take a look at the video made by the school students that shows how they use this device at their school:



Currently the goal of this project is to provide simple kits to school students across the US with these kits. The team has also tested the CellScope at museums and field testing of this device for medical use is ongoing in countries like Ethiopia, India, and Thailand. The details of these experiments were discussed in the American Society for Cell Biology Annual Meeting on December 17th in San Francisco, USA.

[caption id="attachment_44687" align="aligncenter" width="600"]#-Link-Snipped-# CellScope images of microfilariae from 30,000 mfml sample, blood lysed with H2O[/caption]

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