All talk, no science? Your cell phone is smarter than that. Just ask electrical engineer Aydogan Ozcan, inventor of a process for imaging transparent biological specimens with a cell-phone camera’s LED and CMOS sensor. In June, Ozcan’s UCLA biophotonics research team used its cell-phone microscope in Brazil’s Amazon rainforest to capture images of malaria-infected blood. The researchers are now fine-tuning an attachment that converts cell phones into wide-field fluorescence microscopes for water-quality screenings.
Ozcan is among a growing number of scientists seizing the opportunity created by the global prevalence of cell phones—more than 5.3 billion of them and counting—and, increasingly, of mobile tablets, such as Apple’s iPad. The demand for those devices, which typically cost less than $1000, has particularly paid off for scientists looking to exploit the once pricey high-tech hardware and software that make them tick. In the early 1990s, says Ozcan, “we could have paid several thousand dollars for a 1-megapixel CMOS sensor. It was a dream for a researcher to have the 5- or 8- or 12-megapixel CMOS sensors that we now have in our cell phones.”
Smartphones in space
In addition to a camera, most tablets and smartphones—cell phones that support third-party software applications, or apps—also come with other components used in physics research. By interfacing with an Apple iPhone’s three-axis gyroscope, accelerometer, and camera, a new app is expected to give astronauts the ability to measure a spacecraft’s position, its altitude, and Earth’s curvature, all for roughly $750—the cost of the phone plus a 99¢ app.
The app, SpaceLab for iOS, will also allow users on Earth to simulate some of those measurements. Last month two iPhones loaded with SpaceLab for iOS were delivered to the International Space Station on NASA’s final space-shuttle mission.
After discovering that his Motorola Droid smartphone had a three-axis Hall-effect magnetometer, physicist Randall Peters and colleagues at Mercer University in Georgia secured an NIH grant to test the phone’s potential as a seismocardiograph, a wireless monitor of heart health. “Unfortunately the sensitivity of the device is limited by the data range of the available app so it is not yet a viable sensor,” says Peters.
Some scientists and equipment manufacturers are exploring apps and Web-based software that can interface with external scientific instruments. Earlier this year, Agilent Technologies released a software platform that allows chromatography users to remotely monitor the status of their equipment and analyze the generated data. “The next step will be to allow the user to receive automated alerts and to remotely control the instrument, not just monitor it,” says Agilent program manager Linda Doherty.
The software and technology to remotely operate “sophisticated instruments” already exist, says Supratik Guha, director of physical sciences at IBM Research. For example, IBM physicist Rudolf Tromp, through the internet, can remotely operate his “state-of-the-art low-energy electron microscope from his home kitchen table,” says Guha. Tromp’s colleague James Hannon is working on an iPhone app to monitor the same instrument.
“What doesn’t get enough credit is how the high demand for mobile devices has driven innovation in processors,” says Gaurav Khanna, a theoretical astrophysicist at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. Khanna is involved in an NSF project cosponsored by Apple and graphics-hardware manufacturer Nvidia to evaluate the performance of mobile-device processors for scientific computing applications. He says that although current wireless bandwidth isn’t sufficient for supercomputing operations “even if you link 1000 iPads together,” the hardware inside mobile devices is up to the job. They’ve been designed to have “extremely high performance without draining the battery too quickly,” he says.
A global sensing system
Until recently, the most common use for personal mobile devices by scientists had been to access and share research results, says Enrique Canessa, a scientist at the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics in Trieste, Italy. Last November at ICTP, Canessa and colleague Marco Zennaro hosted an international workshop on mobile science that featured sessions on designing apps for data collection and analysis. The workshop also introduced a moniker for mobile science research—m-science—and launched the primer m-Science: Sensing, Computing and Dissemination, which can be downloaded for free at http://www.m-science.net. Canessa says he expects the book to raise awareness of the “huge possibilities of mobile science” and to “motivate a new generation to participate in this rapidly developing new field of research.”
To that end, Canessa and Zennaro have designed a potentiality index to assess countries on their ability to participate in mobile science. The index, which takes into account an area’s density of broadband subscribers and density of working scientists, shows smaller, developed nations like the Netherlands to be most ready for m-science; it also suggests that developing nations, despite being the fastest adopters of mobile technology, will be limited by the relatively low density of scientists in their populations.
A global sensing system is the promise of m-science, says Zennaro. With minimal participation, “we could build the largest scientific instrument ever built; one that could aggregate data on an unprecedented scale.”
Photonics researcher Aydogan Ozcan (standing) and his graduate student Onur Mudanyali compare microscopic images taken by a tabletop optical microscope and by a Sony Ericsson smartphone, which was used to capture diffraction shadows of blood cells.
Photonics researcher Aydogan Ozcan (standing) and his graduate student Onur Mudanyali compare microscopic images taken by a tabletop optical microscope and by a Sony Ericsson smartphone, which was used to capture diffraction shadows of blood cells.
