5 Disease Detector Mobile Applications. The trend has also hit the world of mobile health. New
technologies for the detection of Parkinson's disease using a mobile phone is
being developed by The Parkinson's Voice Initiative, a project to help people
with Parkinson's.
The project was initiated by a scientist Mathematics from
the University of Oxford, England, named Max Little. He developed an algorithm
to detect abnormal sounds that can help detect Parkinson.
Parkinson's is a degenerative neurological
disease that primarily
affects people over the age of 50 years. The disease is named according to the
name of the inventor in 1817, namely Dr. James Parkinson. People with
Parkinson's difficult to move due to muscle stiffness. Some of them even had
dementia.
Symptoms of this disease are sometimes difficult to identify
due to growing together and slowly. Most people, for example, began to feel
shaky in some parts of the body when they are exhausted.
Max Little and his team have tested the applications made by
them, as well as to detect the sound of people who suffer from Parkinson's. The
level of accuracy is obtained, according to little, was as high as 86 percent.
Currently, they are analyzed 10,000 samples collected voice over the telephone
network.
Elsewhere, a variety of mobile applications is also
developed to detect the disease. The Wall Street Journal reported, researchers
from the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center are testing 4 applications to
analyze hundreds of pictures of moles and dark spots, which have previously
been examined by a dermatologist.
The best application is able to detect skin
diseases,
including skin cancer, with an accuracy rate up to 98 percent. While most
applications have only earned 6.8 percent accuracy rate. Unfortunately, the
research conducted by these researchers did not mention the names of the
applications they are testing.
Previously, there are mobile apps are being created to
detect the disease in the lungs. Application called SpiroSmart developed by
researchers at the University of Washington. SpiroSmart works by analyzing the
sound of breathing users.
In addition to developing specific
applications, researchers
and scientists also utilize existing applications to detect disease. One of
them is Twitter. Social media is used by researchers and computer scientists
from Johns Hopkins University for the detection of influenza cases in the
United States. They collect the chirp-chirp of flu neighbors Twitter users to
map the location of the contracted flu epidemic.
In Indonesia, a mobile application for detecting the actual
disease has also been developed. For example, MOSES, an acronym for
"System and Endemic Obervation Malarian Surveliance". The app was
created by a team of students of the Institute of Technology Bandung to
diagnose malaria. The application was elected as the first winner in the
category of Mobile Device Award, the Imagine Cup 2009 competition held by
Microsoft Corp.
In essence, future trends point to the mobile world. A
variety of health
applications being developed aims to help people detect the
disease and care for the environment.
Before it can be used by many people, of course there needs
to be a serious and comprehensive research on the application and related
diseases. But keep in mind; no matter how great an application to detect the
disease, the
application was not developed to replace the role of a doctor.