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LENSFREE IMAGING CYTOMETRY AND DIAGNOSTICS FOR POINT-OF-CARE AND TELEMEDICINE APPLICATIONS
9.1 INTRODUCTION
The cost of wireless cell phone technology has significantly decreased over the last decade. As a result, today, cell phones are in use even in the developing world as highlighted in Figure 9.1 [1]. Furthermore, the technical capabilities of existing cell phones are rapidly improving, which permits various different applications to run on today’s cell phones, together with an enormous amount of computational power that is readily available within a very compact platform. This impressive advancement is one of the central building blocks of the emerging fields of “telemedicine” and “wireless health.” Specifically, utilizing this advanced, state-of-the-art cell phone technology toward point-of-care diagnostics and/or microscopic imaging applications can offer numerous opportunities to improve health care, especially in the developing world where medical facilities and infrastructure are extremely limited or do not even exist. For example, in such resource-scarce settings, it is rather difficult to build a fully functional medical laboratory. Not only are most medical test equipment expensive to start with, but the running costs of such high-tech laboratory devices are also beyond the budget limits of the developing countries. In the meantime, most cell phones today are already equipped with advanced sensing and imaging ...
