Hasta La Gadget!

Got a mysterious, infuriating itch down there? Then pee on your cellphone, wait a moment, and you’ll know whether you just need to take a shower, or a trip to the doctor.

This is the promise of new research in England, where £4-million ($6.5m) has been given to the UK Clinical Research Collaboration to develop this disposable tech. You don’t have to actually urinate on your phone (unless it is an old pre-Android Motorola handset, in which case you might want to anyway). Instead, you will put a few drops of urine or saliva onto a computer chip which you will then plug into the phone. This laboratory-on-a-chip then chugs into action, analyzing the sample and giving a diagnosis within a few minutes.

The actual details of the chips are still undisclosed, but they will be cheap. The idea is to sell them in vending machines in the same places you would buy condoms, for prices as low as 50p to £1 (80-cents to $1.60), making self-testing into an easy and discreet affair, encouraging those who would normally avoid doctors to check themselves out. The chips would be “about the size of a USB chip,” according to the Guardian, and plug straight into the phone or PC. This makes it likely that it would hook-up via micro-USB, something compatible with pretty much everything except the iPhone.

According to the project chief, Dr Tariq Sadiq, “Britain is one of the worst [countries] in western Europe for teenage pregnancy and STIs (sexually transmitted infections).” As a Brit myself, I can confirm this: When not taking drugs or roaming the dismal streets looking for people to stab, young Britons like nothing more than drunken, dangerous sex. Targeting the tech-savvy, cellphone-loving generation with these tests seems a very smart thing to do.

Mobile phone kits to diagnose STDs [Guardian]

Photo: Ron’s Log/Flickr