 BERKELEY, Calif. (KCBS) -- Engineers at U.C. Berkeley have come up with an innovative new use for cell phones that may save countless lives. The hand held devices can now be turned into medical imaging devices.
These high-tech machines are often too costly to use in remote areas of the world, in addition to being hard to maintain. But Berkeley researchers have harnessed the machine’s power into a cell phone.
”We took advantage of the fact that cellular phones are ubiquitous, everywhere you go,” said Cal Professor Boris Rubinski. “The phone works in the very traditional mode of sending text messages and receiving images.”
The phones will be transmitting raw imaging data from remote villages, almost anywhere in the world to a central server that is thousands of miles away, and then back to the same cell phone as processed images.
Rubinski says he hopes this will pave the way for more high-tech handheld medical devices.
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KCBS' Jeff Bell reports
