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Researcher: Mobile Phones Could Revolutionise Medical Imaging

Budi Putra — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 11:00:34 +0000

Your cellphone one day will not only be used for making a call, sending text messages or enjoying mobile entertainment, but also could be a tool for your medical imaging. Your doctor will transmit your medical information from his server into your mobile phone’s screen.

Engineers at the University of California, Berkeley, developed an innovative concept to allow cell phone could be used to make medical imaging accessible to billions of people around the world.

“Medical imaging is something we take for granted in industrialized countries,” said Boris Rubinsky, UC Berkeley professor, but can be an expensive thing for poorer countries. “Our new system would make imaging technology inexpensive and accessible for these underserved populations.”

Rubinsky and his team came up with the novel idea to create a new system by establishing a
large center where all resources for operation and maintenance can be fully stored. This central location would be used to service multiple remote sites and collect the raw data from the patients. That’s where the cell phone comes in.

The phone would transmit the raw data to the central server to create an image and then relay it back to the cell phone. The patient can viewed it on cell phone’s screen.

It’s almost possible, Rubinsky said, and the screen size of a cell phone should not be a major impediment since “people are able to watch full movies on their iPods.” It’s make sense, really.

Source

KDDI launch Visual Search app for Japanese camera-phones

Chris Davies — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 18:54:27 +0000

Japanese carrier KDDI is launching a visual search application on its Spring 2008 range of “au” handsets. The app, called ER Search, was developed by Evolution Robotics and is operated by Bandai networks, who have already installed it on more than a million handsets in the past twelve months. Described as “hyperlinking the physical world”, ER Search allows users to take photographs of books, CDs, DVDs and other items and then view content based on software recognition of that image.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Taking a photo of a CD, for instance, could pull up price comparisons from online stores (with the ability to buy direct from the handset), links to the artist’s back catalogue and even lyrics from featured songs. Audio and video clips would also be available. The software is being offered as a free download to owners of earlier “au” model cellphones; Bandai apparently funds the system via referral fees.

ER Search is similar to the idea of ‘augmented reality’, whereby real-world objects are tagged with real-time data on a mobile device. Enkin, a recent entry in Google’s Android Developer Challenge promises just that, with GPS and motion data used for real-time object/building tracking. However Enkin goes farther than ER Search, as it works in real-time rather than from snapshots.

[via mocoNews]

Green house Optical Zoom Lens for Mobile Phone

Kim Poh Liaw — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 12:59:54 +0000

Green House in Japan has start to offer a optical zoom len which enable 8x optical zoom on your mobile phone. Selling at around 88 USD, the GH-ML8 camera kits also bundle with a mini tripod to improve the stability when you zoom in.

The camera lens comes in black or silver color, both support mobile phone with a width of 42 to 68 mm. More photos at next page.

Source via [k-tai]