New mobile app and device could help monitor ear infections

Researchers at Georgia Tech and Emory University have been working on a way to turn a regular smartphone into an otoscope, a device doctors use to check out what’s going on inside your ears.

The team have created an accessory that they call a Remotoscope, which works with an attachment and a dedicated app to allow regular parents to peer inside children’s ears. The accessory puts a scope over your phone’s camera lens and gives it a flash too, so along with the app that magnifies what you see, you can take a photo and quickly send it to your physician.

The device and accompanying app aren’t on the market yet, but provide parents with a great way of monitoring their child’s health. Although a physician would need to analyse and diagnose the images, parents can carry out the simple tasks, take the photos and save the professionals time in the process. This seems to be an emerging trend among health apps at the moment, not giving regular people the tools to diagnose themselves, but giving them the tools to monitor, track and carry out simple tasks that can then be looked at in further detail by those in the medical profession.

[Via TUAW]