Future phones could measure your health Dr Phone If researchers
have their way, your smartphone could one day eliminate the time
spent in doctors waiting rooms, and perhaps even tell you
whether you have cancer. A team of scientists at Korea Advanced
Institute of Science of Technology (KAIST) write in a paper
published in the German journal Angewandte Chemie, that touch
screen technology can be used to detect biomolecular matter,
much as is done in medical tests. "It began from the idea that
touch screens work by recognising the electronic signs from the
touch of the finger, and so the presence of specific proteins
and DNA should be recognizable as well," says Hyun-gyu Park, who
with Byong-yeon Won led the study. The touch screens on
smartphones, PDAs or other electronic devices work by sensing
the electronic charges from the user's body on the screen.
Biochemicals such as proteins and DNA molecules also carry
specific electronic charges. According to KAIST, the team's
experiments showed that touch screens ca