To diagnose a disease like tuberculosis, you need two things: a good microscope and someone who understands medicine.
Andrew Miller spent his senior year of college designing a device that makes the first component more accessible — a portable, battery-powered $240 microscope similar to devices that retail for as much as $40,000. But even as Rice University began field tests with the prototype, he questioned the impact it could make in global health.
“I was inventing this new, cool tech, but I also knew that I wasn’t solving the problem,” he says. “You also need to have people there to use the microscope.”
Bringing healthcare providers to developing countries is not a likely project for a medical device engineer. It turns out, however, that bringing microscope contents to doctors elsewhere was a project that Miller could tackle.
To make diagnosing from a distance more viable, he and his co-founder Tess Bakke developed a simple plastic smartphone holder called Skylight that turns any microscope into a camera. After attaching any camera-phone to any microscope, users can easily take photos and videos of diagnostic slides and share them with doctors elsewhere via email, text or video conferencing.
Hospitals already use cameras that transmit diagnostic images, but these can cost as much as $10,000. Adapters that allow SLR cameras to photograph slides are also easy to find and cost less than $1,000, but SLR cameras are more difficult than camera-phones to find in most of the world. Both of these options are often made for specific modern microscopes, whereas Skylight, which will sell for about $60, fits even microscopes made in 1980.
Miller and Bakke are building the first Skylights with $22,727 they raised through a Kickstarter campaign and prototyping services they won through a Proto Labs contest.
Along the way, they noticed another potential application for the device in schools. Putting smartphones on microscopes allow multiple students to view one microscope at a time.
It also, Miller says, makes microscopes a bit more exciting. “Younger people, who are used to always being with their phones, can interact with old technology in a new way,” he says.
The first Skylight will ship to Kickstarter funders in March.
Though the device has the potential to make the microscope a viable tool for diagnosis in more of the world, the team hasn’t run out of challenges to solve. How to distribute the devices, and where to find doctors who will diagnose images created by camera-phones, are on the top of the list.
More About: global health, kickstarter, Skylight
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