Thanks to a new sensor technology that has been developed in Germany, you could soon be monitoring your pregnancy scares using your smartphone.
We always bang on about how smartphones can do everything but they actually can do everything. Thanks to a new sensor technology known as Surface Plasmon Resonance, (SPR) you’ll soon be able to add pregnancy checks to its ever expanding list of uses.
SPR is a phenomenon that occurs when a beam of light hits a metallic film, causing a small band to be absorbed by the films surface. This creates a resonance within the electrons on the surface of the film, which can be used to measure things such as pregnancy and diabetes. The great thing is that there are no needles involved, with the sensor able to read everything through your flesh (hopefully it also works with tattoo’s *cough* Apple).
The equipment has actually been around for quite some time and is regularly used within laboratory conditions for determining information about biological samples. The problem was that it was too big and cumbersome to apply the technology within a smart device. A team of scientists at the university of Hanover in Germany have managed to shrink it down into a U-shaped device that can be attached to existing smartphone devices. By fixing it to an existing optical sensor, users will have the ability to detect SPR.
The implications for this within medical field are pretty large, as we may soon be entering an era where we can monitor our health on a much deeper level without needing regular trips to the GP