Screening Anemia Using Your Smartphone.

In this world where anything or almost everything is done with mobile phones, the electrical engineers and computer scientists from the University of Washington have added to the versatility of smartphones by developing an app tagged "HemaApp", which makes it possible to use a smartphone camera to estimate hemoglobin concentrations and screen for anemia.

HemaApp is a smartphone application that mildly monitors blood hemoglobin concentration by illuminating the patient’s finger with a smartphone’s camera flash.

The mobile app is not intended to replace blood tests, which remain the most accurate way to measure hemoglobin. But the early test results, from patients that ranged in age from 6 to 77 years old, suggest HemaApp can be an effective and affordable initial screening tool to determine whether further blood testing is warranted. When used to screen for anemia, HemaApp correctly identified cases of low hemoglobin levels 79 percent of the time using just the phone camera, and 86 percent of the time when aided with some light sources.

Before now, to obtain this basic measurement of hemoglobin, health care providers either have to draw blood with a needle or intravenous line, or spend hundreds to thousands of dollars on a specialized machine that measures hemoglobin non-invasively.

By shining light from the phone’s camera flash through the patient’s finger, in combination with a common incandescent lightbulb, and with a low-cost LED lighting attachment, HemaApp analyzes the color of his or her blood to estimate hemoglobin concentrations.
The additional illumination sources tap into other parts of the electromagnetic spectrum that have useful absorption properties but that aren’t currently found on all smartphone cameras.
“New phones are beginning to have more advanced infrared and multi-color LED capabilities,” said senior author Shwetak Patel , the Washington Research Foundation Entrepreneurship Endowed Professor in Computer Science & Engineering and Electrical Engineering. “But what we found is that even if your phone doesn’t have all that, you can put your finger near an external light source like a common lightbulb and boost the accuracy rates.”