Telemedicine Applications of Strip

One of the things that we liked about the strip we created is its application for telemedicine. Although it was very valuable for us to create a reader for our strips, initially we were thinking of going along the lines of having a cell phone take a picture of our strips in order to read them. Once the patient, or nurse, takes an image of our strip using a cell phone, they can send it to an off-site computer, which would analyze it for average color intensity, and send back a resulting glucose level- this would be based on experiments done previously. This process is illustrated below.


Some of the benefits of this process are:
1. The ability for a health care provider to go to poorer, and more remote areas, and use a cell phone to take images of diagnostic tests and send them back to a central facility expands the number of patients that can be reached.
2. The results for the glucose concentrations are stored in a database, and can be accessed by doctors as necesary.

We thought of some of the problems that may arise and posible solutions for them:
1. Changing ambient light- This could be solved by having a color gradient on the strip itselt, which would allow the color that eventually shows up to be matched to a color on the gradient by the computer, and so be calibrated.
2. Changing camera position- This could be solved by having a barcode on the strips that would allow the orientation of the image to be recognized by the computer- this technology does exist.

In the end, we like that our test strips will eventually be able to be used in a variety of situations, whether with the reader that we are developing, or with a cell phone, and computer application. The reader is a good solution for us to pursue first because it is cheap (camera cell phones are not so cheap), portable, easy to use, and can be used in areas with no cell phone reception (this actualy was one of the problems we learnt about in Nicaragua). There is a greater possibility of all patients having a glucose reader, but not of everyone having a camera phone. The reader was also designed with local production in mind, and that is another benefit for the local people.