Is that a laboratory in your pocket…?

Tweeting pictures of your lunch? Is that the best you can do with your smartphone? Russ Swan argues the devices have untapped potential as pocket labs. Is that a laboratory in your pocket…?

IT IS often said that the average human uses only about 10% of their brain’s capacity. As scientists, we know that to be merely an urban myth – an idea that is slightly amusing and which has gained traction mainly through being repeated endlessly.

The correct statistic is that the average human uses only about 10% of their smartphone’s capacity.

Truly these devices are the wonder of our age. Contained within a sleek slab of glass and metal, even a modest smartphone offers more processing power and memory than a typical desktop computer of the late 20th century. What’s more, it includes motion sensors, gyroscopes, GPS navigation, wireless communication, and a high-resolution camera or two. The sensible ones also have expandable memory and the ability to run just about any program you (or your IT department) can write for it. What’s more, it can access the global repository of all information that we call the internet.

Apparently these devices can also make telephone calls, although I’d like to see some evidence before I believe this.

What I have seen evidence for is the growing potential for that pocket-sized miracle of technology to augment, and even replace, certain instruments on your lab bench. Surprising as it may seem, some of the high-end equipment that defines what a laboratory is can now be replicated with a few relatively cheap smartphone accessories and a bit of clever programming.

I’m not talking here about the growing range of apps that do little other than provide access to a sales catalogue or online ordering system, or even access to instrument specifications, experiment protocols, and data sheets. I mean actual analytical instruments built around a standard bit of consumer electronics.

Or are you just pleased to see me?

Conversion kits to transform a smartphone into a useful microscope have been around for a few years – the first I learned of was in 2008, just a year after the first iPhone, which is practically forever ago in phone evolution. The timing has nothing to do with Apple’s product cycle, though, as most of the really interesting developments have taken place on other platforms.

The CellScope sprang out of an academic lab at UC Berkeley, as a way of using fairly simple clip-on optics to greatly increase the macro capabilities of a phone camera. The resulting microscope could image cells, on what the Americans call a cell phone. Geddit?

This has turned into a commercial spin-off with two diagnostic instruments, an otoscope to take images in the ear, and a dermascope for skin imaging, both using optics to enhance the smartphone camera. These are both what I call collect-and-despatch applications, where an inexpert user simply takes an image and sends it off to a doctor for diagnosis.

The potential uses of even this basic level of smartphone capability are pretty staggering. Healthcare and aid workers in remote locations, provided they can access a cellular network, can use one of the variety of similar systems to take an image of a prepared slide, and have a doctor thousands of miles away view it within seconds.

Such is the evolution of technology that microscope attachments for popular phones are now available in High Street gadget shops, costing just a few pounds.

Further developments are beginning to offer diagnoses directly on the phone. Last year a team from Harvard and MIT revealed an Elisa reader built into a very basic five-year-old Sony Ericsson handset. An app based on MatLab was able to analyse the colour created by a reagent on an ELISA slide, providing on-phone diagnosis with a claimed 90% sensitivity.

A further development of this is the use of the smartphone’s camera as a colorimeter. A paper published this year in the Bulletin of the Korean Chemical Society described how this is achieved: take a single image of both the sample (pH paper, for example) and reference colours, generate a calibration curve from the reference colours, and plot the position of the sample on that curve. The result is a near-instant digital colorimetric readout.

Full-blown spectrometric measurement is also becoming a reality, and looks like it may soon be common. As I write this, a crowd-funded project to develop a low cost spectrometer kit for a smartphone has attracted six times its target funding, with over 1000 backers pledging upwards of $66,000. The hardware will cost just a few pounds, but what is really intriguing is that the project is generating its own wiki-style spectral database that will allow anybody with the kit to perform spectroscopic analysis. The project developers say they imagine a kind of ‘Shazam for materials’ to investigate spills, diagnose crop diseases, identify household products, and even analyse foodstuffs.

The phone is already ubiquitous, but its potential remains largely untapped. Before long, instead of simply uploading pictures of your lunch to Facebook, you may be able to determine whether that salad carries any pesticide residue while you do so. And won’t that give you something to tweet about!