Aydogan Ozcan, assistant professor of electrical engineering at the University of California, Los Angeles, has developed the CelloPhone—a cell phone attachment that functions as an affordable, portable alternative to the traditional microscope. The CelloPhone, a project out of Ozcan Research Group, can analyze samples of blood, urine, and saliva without a microscope lens. Instead, the device uses the LUCAS--Lens-free Ultra-wide field Cell monitoring Array--platform to analyze samples based on shadow imaging. Instead of imaging bacteria and microbes through a series of lenses that magnify the sample, the device records the shadows of the cells or bacteria in a sample. Images are captured using a special light source and the phone's camera.

Early tests of focus include malaria and HIV as examples, both of which play a role in maternal mortality. With the ability analyze blood, urine and saliva one can envision a battery of tests that could help women deliver safely--eventually.

The CelloPhone results can be sent by multimedia message to a laptop to be processed, with the results sent back to the phone as a text message. As Ozcan remarked in a BBC report on mobile technology, "We get rid of one of the most expensive components by replacing it with computer code." Instead of lenses, algorithms process the samples. This device could drastically decrease the funds and infrastructure required for lab work in low-resource areas. Ozcan estimates that the CelloPhone attachment will only cost about $10. The CelloPhone was a winner in Vodafone’s 2009 wireless innovation project; watch a video of how the CelloPhone works on Vodafone’s website here.