The iPhone as an eNose used to sniff out disease

In just a short time, smartphones will undoubtedly change the way we interact with the world, even moreso than they already have. One of the biggest potential impacts of this trend is on the medical industry, as more and more doctors and nurses are turning to phones and tablets from Apple and Android to help patients better understand what is happening to their bodies while ill. My wife is a budding occupational therapist (graduating this weekend, in fact), and the two of us are working on a project to find or create the best iOS/Android applications therapists can use to assist them in treating patients, or that patients can use to better keep track of their illnesses. We’ve learned that there are tons of cool and useful programs out there, but these represent only the tip of the iceberg for what’s to come.

The Technology Review has discovered a research team at the California Institute of Technology that would significantly change the way iPhones and iPads are used in treating patients. Many common sicknesses have a unique chemical vapor profile, and the team is developing an eNose that can literally smell out sickness by identifying the vapors a patient is emitting. One of the team members believes that in the near future the technology will be small and affordable enough that a health care provider can carry it around as an attachment to a smartphone to perform instant diagnosis on patients.

The technology would eliminate the need for a medical lab in some cases, as several illnesses have distinct chemical profiles that are easily identifiable by smell. Of course, some illnesses aren’t as easily identified by smell, and these illnesses would still require the customary lab profiles we’ve come to expect. Still, some of the most common illnesses can be identified in such a manner, as evidenced by a study in India that successfully identified tuberculosis from a urine sample, predicting the disease’s presence with nearly 99% accuracy.

“The researchers collected urine samples from more than 100 newly diagnosed TB patients in New Delhi. They analyzed molecules from the urine that evaporate quickly in the air, called volatile organic compounds (VOCs), using gas chromatography and mass spectrometry, which give a detailed readout of chemical components and their concentrations. Using this method to hunt for patterns, they identified several VOCs that occurred in significantly different concentrations in infected individuals. Using this signature, they were able to predict TB infection in another group of patients with nearly 99 percent accuracy.”

While we likely won’t see these types of devices in smartphones in the near future (perhaps not even this decade), the breakthroughs in medical technology researchers are currently coming up with will greatly change the way we consume and interact with health care in the not-too-distant future. I, for one, am excited to see where this trend of eMedicine takes us.