Do you remember when you were first diagnosed with diabetes?
How many months, or maybe years, leading up to the diagnosis were you confused, scared and dizzy?
How many doctors visits, with copays and long wait times, did it take before someone finally heard you out, all the way through to your diagnosis?
Doctor’s offices and medical labs have become the stuff that American nightmares are made of. The healthcare climate in the US is certainly hostile, and any pending diagnosis only adds fuel to the fire. The very thought of having to rely on a simple doctor’s appointment, made months in advance, no less, to get a diagnosis can be downright dangerous for many.
Well, imagine if you could take care of all of that right from your own home.
No more waiting for an appointment date. No more 15-minute check-ups that send you in circles for tests, labs and readings for yet another appointment just to tell you what the lab results are. No more being sent home with nothing but a confirmation of a diagnosis.
Now, thanks to a few scientists in Korea, a new technology has emerged that can allow you to skip all of the dizzying medical trickery and diagnose yourself with diabetes right from home.
They developed a paper-based electronic chip that can not only diagnose a disorder but
also analyze the medical data regarding the disorder, all through your smartphone.
That’s not even the coolest part.
You can make the electronic chip, yourself, by printing it off your home printer!
The chip is reported to detect three types of changes in the blood, each related to the kidneys, pancreas, and brain. One of the readable diseases with this chip is diabetes.
Type 2 diabetes is exploding in prevalence among the US population, so it seems like the market for this technology is certainly there. Even more promising is how this technology can be used for type 1 diabetes among children.
Imagine being able to test your child the moment you notice that something is not-quite-right. This is virtually every parent’s dream come true when it comes to immediate attention to the potential disease.
This technology obviously has some hoops to jump through before ever making it to the mainstream market (and hopefully by that time the health care situation is a little more sorted out). Even so, technology is absolutely amazing when it can work to benefit people on the individual level, such as this.
[expand title=”References“]
Business Korea. URL Link. Accessed April 13, 2017.
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