CellScope, a mobile health company based in San Francisco, is now focused on commercializing technologies for at-home diagnostic applications. We covered the startup before—most recently in 2009, and since then, the company has made significant progress. “Our first two products will be an otoscope and a dermascope attachment for common problems like ear infections and skin conditions, enabling telemedicine diagnosis from home,” Erik Douglas, the company’s CEO told Medgadget. “We use lower-magnification optics to capture a wider field, and a new illumination system to leverage the phone’s LED flash,” he says. The company is currently conducting pilot studies with doctors around the Bay Area.
The company’s technology uses a cell phone’s camera to capture diagnostic images. It could be used for skin exams and for analyzing blood samples. The smartphone-based otoscope could enable remote diagnosis of pediatric ear infections, which cause 30 million doctor visits annually in the United States.
The idea behind the company was hatched in the lab of UC Berkeley bioengineering professor Dan Fletcher several years ago when the firm’s CEO, Erik Douglas, was a post-doc at the university.
The company, which was a graduate of incubator Rock Health’s first class of startups in 2011, recently announced that it has received $1 million in seed funding from Kholsa Ventures.
In the video below, Douglas explains how the company is still figuring out how the technology “fits within the healthcare landscape [and] how traditional fee for service doctors can get paid for these sorts of things—even when it is more efficient for them, it is quicker for them, it is the same diagnosis, often better than what they would get in the traditional setting.”
Link: CellScope…
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