Smartphone App Uses Selfies to Check Your Cholesterol Level

A team of engineers has designed a smartphone accessory and app that allows users to monitor their own blood cholesterol levels. Think of it as a sort of cholesterol selfie — or maybe a healthie?

As researchers from Cornell University explain in a paper in the journal Lab on a Chip, all you need — aside from their attachment and a smartphone — is a reagent test strip and a willingness to draw your own blood. Cholesterol tests tend to rely on reagent strips that turn different colors, depending on the cholesterol levels of the blood placed on them. The researchers’ achievement was to design an attachment to be placed over the smartphone flash and camera that can illuminate and capture the color of the strip, rendering unnecessary specialized equipment or an in-person health professional. The lab is working on a smartphone app that can determine vitamin D levels, too.

The technology is relatively straightforward, and the research group is one of many developing smartphone tools such as these. Already, apps can turn smartphones into heart-rate monitors,sleep monitors or ultrasound machines, to name just a few. According to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, half of the more than 3.4 billion smartphone and tablet users worldwide will have downloaded mobile health applications by 2018.

Whether they use them regularly is another question. Still, the continuing spread of smartphones globally and the determination of health policymakers to drive down costs make such cheap, idiot-proof (at least, idiot-resistant) technologies all-but inevitable

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9 Things You Would Immediately Fail Without Your Smartphone

9 Things You Would Immediately Fail Without Your SmartphoneImagine waking up one morning and noticing your smartphone is missing. Really missing, not just buried under your blankets or abandoned in a coat pocket. Now imagine that happened to every single smartphone user.

Sound like a bad Twilight Zone episode? Oh, it could be. But consider what it would actually mean.

One of the most common criticisms about 21st century society is our dependence on technology, particularly smartphones. It's no secret many of us rely a teensy bit too much on our mobile devices and, perhaps as a result, we're abandoning some real world know-how in favor of convenience.

Here we consider what most of us would essentially have to relearn without access to smartphones.

1. Find Our Way Home

Image: 20th Century Fox

Smartphones have become our maps, compasses and personal navigators. How far is the apartment from Walgreens, again? This seems too far.

2. Have Any Idea of What We Look Like

Image: NBC

Unless you're the proud owner of a pocket mirror, most of us use our smartphones to check ourselves out. Have you checked lately? You should check.

3. Remember Phone Numbers Besides Our Own and 911

Image: Youtube, Biglazylab

Good luck making a phone call to anyone besides the current residents of your childhood home.

4. Check the Weather Outside

Image: Youtube, Baileyandfriends

If you still check outside your window every morning, you're better than most of us.

5. Calculate the Tip at a Restaurant

Image:Comedy Central

What's an appropriate tip on a $40 check? Is $0.26 okay?

6. Wake Up

Image:Paramount

Though some of us are still firmly team clock radio, millions of smartphone users would hibernate through winter without their cheerful island ringtone to wake them up.

7. Fill Silences in Conversation

Image: 20th Century Fox Television

When double dates turn awkward, our phones become our happy place. Away from all the uncomfortable silence and the lack of topics to discuss.

8. How to Spell Most Words

Image:Fox Interactive

Autocorrect is super helpful (albeit sketch), but where would you be without your phone's red squiggly line, patiently letting you know that you're a terrible speller? In a bad place, that's where.

9. Remember Things

Image: 20th Century Fox

Every appointment you've ever had is stored in the history of your reminders app. Your college GPA rests precariously on the continued survival of your note-taking app of choice. Sometimes, good, old, easily lost, highly flammable paper is the best option.

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Bendable Smartphones Aren't Coming Anytime Soon

Samsung Electronics's Galaxy Round smartphone retails in Korea for about $1,000. It's that expensive for a reason.
The curved display has graduated from science fiction to store shelves, but manufacturing them is still a challenging and expensive process. Screen makers are struggling to figure out the techniques needed to produce millions of the screens cheaply.
As for phones you can bend or fold? Don't hold your breath.
Mass-produced mobile devices with flexible — and eventually, foldable — screens may be as far as a decade away, according to Max McDaniel, chief marketing officer of Applied Materials's display business group. He showed Bloomberg firsthand some of the complexities involved on a recent tour of an R&D lab at the Santa Clara, Calif.-based company, the world's largest maker of the machinery used to produce displays.
One of the main sticking points is an elusive screen technology called organic light-emitting diode, or OLED. Electronics makers have been touting the advantages of OLED since the days when PCs were big towers connected to bulky tube monitors. It allows companies to make screens that are thinner, sharper and more energy-efficient. Currently, that comes with a big trade-off: price.
Producing large amounts of these screens, using machines costing tens of millions of dollars that can deposit microscopic layers of materials in a vacuum, is expensive because of the relatively high failure rate, said McDaniel. One tiny speck of dust can be enough to send a whole screen to the scrap heap.
Even when they do get it right, the screens don't have a very long lifespan. OLED materials, which must be encased in a protective layer, can decay quickly. So it only makes sense to use the technology in smartphones or similar devices that people typically hang onto for no more than two years or so, McDaniel said.
Gadget makers aren't giving up on OLED. Samsung uses that type of screen in its high-end flagship Galaxy S line of phones. Even with the support of the world's largest smartphone maker, OLED hasn't grabbed much market share, said Vinita Jakhanwal, an analyst at market researcher IHS.

"Even with over 10 years of development and being incorporated in one of the best-selling handsets out there, it's still only 8 to 10% of the mobile handset market,"

"Even with over 10 years of development and being incorporated in one of the best-selling handsets out there, it's still only 8 to 10% of the mobile handset market," she said. Curved displays are even harder to make. They involve a painstaking process where a thin film is laid on a flat surface, lifted off and then adhered to a curved piece of plastic almost like a sticker, according to Jakhanwal. She expects the failure rate to be higher for these screens, which sends costs even higher.
Samsung's Galaxy Round and the G Flex from LG Electronics, which hits stores in Hong Kong on Friday, will probably be the only two phones on the market this year that use that complex curved-OLED technology, Jakhanwal said. But Applied Materials is seeing increased interest from phone makers in those types of screens, McDaniel said.
"You're going to start to see more and more curved displays," he predicts. "Flat phones are going to start to look dorky."
Curved and flexible displays could account for 16% of the display market by 2023, compared with less than 1% this year, according to Touch Display Research. The market for OLED screens is expected to rise to about $93.8 million in 2014, and the first flexible displays could come as early as 2016, the researcher said.
For Applied, though, the difficulties of OLED and flexible displays are a chance to sell more technology and machinery after the stagnation caused by the relatively slow growth in TV size, McDaniel said. More complexity requires more capable machines and processes. That requires factory upgrades.
However, solving screen manufacturing issues is only part of the puzzle. Component makers will need to figure out how to make a battery that can be bent without failing and other parts such as cases that can flex.
"We're a long way from foldable," McDaniel said.

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Smarty Ring Sends Smartphone Updates to Your Finger

One ring to rule them all — or at least manage all of your incoming smartphone alerts.
That's the idea behind Smarty Ring, a Bluetooth-enabled wearable gadget that allows users to check smartphone alerts and manage incoming calls right from their finger.

Users can manage the settings for their Smarty Ring from a mobile app, and can even use the device as a watch, timer or phone finder. If a user walks more than 30 feet from his phone (sadly, a rare occurrence these days), the ring will beep to alert him that he's left something behind.
The stainless-steel ring has a 24-hour battery life. Android and iOS devices are all compatible, as long as they have Bluetooth 4.0 capabilities, according to Smarty Ring's Indiegogo page.

Despite the general popularity of wearable devices (the Pebble Watch raised more than $10 million on Kickstarter), Smarty Ring's Indiegogo campaign is struggling. Since launching in early November, its campaign has raised only $6,500 of the team's $40,000 goal, with 4 days remaining.
Still, Smarty Ring's campaign is set up so that money will be collected even if the campaign goal is not met.

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Ask A Dev: Why Did Apple Decide to Offer a Budget iPhone?

Since September, Apple's iPhone event has sparked many questions about iOS mobile development.
In the latest video of our Ask a Dev series, iOS architect Kevin Harwood provides answers to those questions, including why Apple chose to sell its "budget" iPhone 5C. He also offers helpful resources for those starting to develop iOS apps.

See also: Ask a Dev: Should I Develop for iOS or Android First?

The new Apple A7 system-on-a-chip found in every iPhone 5S is twice as fast as its A6 predecessor. The A7 also introduces twice the level of improvement on graphics performance, especially apparent in gaming, and it opens the door for apps to be made with faster and more powerful 64-bit chip architecture in the future.
When discussing Apple's decision to offer the iPhone 5C, Harwood says, "Apple's new strategy is going to be releasing a phone at that price point every year that's an updated newer model to continue the attack on the lower price range of smartphones."
Lastly, Harwood recommends his favorite tools for app development on iOS including, Apple's developer resource page and the video tutorials on Lynda.com. He also suggests investing in some Apress books for learning Objective-C programming and other coding syntax for the iOS platform.
Our developer experts are from Mutual Mobile, a leading development and design firm that builds mobile strategies for top companies such as Audi, Google and Citigroup. The team is eager to answer your questions about mobile, so ping us with your top queries on Twitter, using the hashtag #AskaDev. Don't forget to check out our Ask a Dev YouTube channel and subscribe.

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