The Miracles of Modern Medicine; Check your Urine on Your Smartphone with UCheck App

[dgstorm]

We can't blame you if you see that headline and immediately wonder if this new app called UCheck will require you to pee on your smartphone. We wondered the same thing at first. To answer your immediate curiosity, the answer is no. This app does not require you to urinate on your Android or iPhone. The app does allow you to utilize the camera sensor on your phone to check a series of urine strips and get the same answer you would from going into a doctor's lab. This would allow you to monitor several different medical issues from kidney to liver and more. Here's a quote from the developer explaining their "inspiration,"

"Everybody pees, and everybody carries a cellphone," Myshkin Ingawale, co-founder of med tech company Biosense Technologies, the maker of an upcoming iPhone and Android app Uchek, said unveiling the new app. "We figured we had to be able to do something with this."

Now, here's a quote explaining the UCheck app a bit more,

Right now, to get a urine check, you have to go into a hospital where urine is tested using one of six available brands of analyzers, each using expensive urine strips that are not compatible with others.

The Uchek on the other hand is much simpler, using cheap urine strips that change color after you pee on them. You have to take a few photographs of those strips over a couple of minutes. They use 10 pads that deliberately change color, but instead of using an expert you can use your smartphone to analyze those. It is almost like reading a QR code.

After the analysis is done you get a breakdown of the chemical components in your blood. And below you can see a video with Ingawale about another mobile health solution from last year.

Just think... using the new Sony Xperia Z as an example, they might could actually integrate this technology directly into the smartphone without needing the pee strips. Now we will have a legitimate reason to take our devices to the restroom with us!

All kidding aside, this app proves that the avenues of innovation smartphones are capable of exceeds even the wildest of imaginations. It makes you wonder if, one day, our smart-devices will eventually evolve into a Start Trek-like Tricorder that will also figure out everything that is ailing us. Smart money would probably bet on that particular fiction becoming a reality.

Source: PhoneArena and UCheck

 

[kodiak799]

Poorly calibrated camera settings (or just bad pics) is likely to cause some medical scares

 

[justin82]

so many jokes..so little time

 

[kodiak799]

so many jokes..so little time

Over/under on some guy thinking he's pregnant from this thing?

 

[jmartens8]

....

 

[justin82]

over/under on some guy thinking he's pregnant from this thing?

lol.

 

[johnomaz]

Wonder how many people will pee on their phone.

 

[kodiak799]

Wonder how many people will pee on their phone.

Could be a sales boom for the water-proof models

 

[justin82]

Could be a sales boom for the water-proof models

or liquipel

 

[pc747]

There is an iphone in the op for a reason .

 

[Rappenwolf]

With this technology, other apps could be worked

Being diabetic and having to carry around a glucose meter along with everything else is bothersome. Perhaps someone could come up with a an attachment to read testing strips for blood suger readings. Sort of like the credit card-reading cubes. Something to think about.

 

[wicozani]

Being diabetic and having to carry around a glucose meter along with everything else is bothersome. Perhaps someone could come up with a an attachment to read testing strips for blood suger readings. Sort of like the credit card-reading cubes. Something to think about.

Google Dexcom CGM. It, and several other companies, are marketing wireless transdermal monitors that you wear on your abdomen (or other places) that send real-time interstitial blood glucose values to your smartphone. You don't even need to stick yourself with this technology. There is also an attachment for iPhones that turns your phone into an EKG machine, taking a single lead EKG tracing of your heart rhythm with just your fingers and thumb; all on your phone. This is the future of medicine, which should tremendously reduce costs and provide better care, including much better and efficient self-care.