Hmmm,
…plans to sell a consumer-geared gadget that, along with a smartphone, tracks vital signs like blood pressure, temperature, and heart rate. If the device sounds a bit like the fictional tricorder from Star Trek, it should: Scanadu’s team is among those competing in the Qualcomm Tricorder X Prize
We need to stop calling them phones and acknowledge that we are now carrying around a hand held computer that is perfectly capable of doing anything we asked a heavy duty desktop computer to do in the past. Phone calls are incidental.
However the fact that a smart phone is connected to the world through the cell phone network means that data collected from a smart phone diagnostic can be easily uploaded to a cloud based platform for analysis and storage.
There are already ultrasonic devices available for physicians that plug into smart phones. Eventually we may have a dental diagnostic like the S-Ray a patient could take home, inset into their mouths gather data and upload it with a smart phone. The data could include perio evaluations, caries detection and a 3-d digital image of the teeth. The dentist (anywhere in the world) could evaluate it as if the patient was in the chair.