“..researchers have been trying for decades to figure out how to build an inexpensive odor sensor for quick, reliable and noninvasive diagnoses. The field finally seems on the cusp of succeeding. “You’re seeing a convergence of technology now, so we can actually run large-scale clinical studies to get the data to prove odor analysis has real utility,” said Billy Boyle, co-founder and president of operations at Owlstone, a manufacturer of chemical sensors in Cambridge, England…. …The sensor is a silicon chip stacked with various metal layers and tiny gold electrodes. While it looks like your mobile phone’s SIM card, it works like a chemical filter. The molecules in an odor sample are first ionized — given a charge — and then an electric current is used to move only chemicals of diagnostic interest through the channels etched in the chip, where they can be detected”

mHealth Insights

Here are a few reasons why it will be your Mobile or your Doctors Mobile (and not a machine) that keeps you well by smelling you:

> The smartphone physical debuted in 2013 at TedMed and already a lot of the tech is practically mainstream eg. the Alivecor has become the worlds fastest selling ECG machine in history (in addition to being the easiest to use and lowest cost) with as many as 1 in 5 Irish GPs is probably having one and NHS GPs are claiming that these inexpensive devices are saving the NHS hundreds of millions of pounds.

> The $10Million StarTrek Tricorder X Prize was awarded to mobile accessories. No wonder the world’s biggest medical device companies are running in fear of becoming iPhone accessory brands!

> The world’s smartest tech Analysts may be claiming that Smartphone innovation is dead but the CEO of the world’s biggest Mobile device brand with $256 Billion in cash reserves is so crazy he has said that he thinks the mHealth market will dwarf the smartphone market.

> When digital technology converges it converges to mobile. We will drop the Health in mHealth not the m.

How will it happen? Ask the Born Mobile generation.