Smartphone Technology Helps Patients to Test Their Own Hemoglobin Levels
Georgia Tech, and the Coulter Department’s, collaborations with Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta and Emory University has led to another innovative improvement within healthcare. It all started when a Children's Healthcare of Atlanta patient, Rob Mannino, began studying his own disease, beta thalassemia. He came up with the idea to photograph fingernails with a smartphone and compare them to the hemoglobin measured from blood draws. Still in the early stages of testing, the application of the algorithm in a mobile device will have to go through multiple clinical studies and be approved by the Food and Drug Administration before it is actually implemented.