50-Cent Microscope That Folds Like Origami [video]

In general, I believe the premise of this is a bit off. You often see that people from the west try to design "low-cost" devices for developing countries by introducing paradigm-shifting changes to the design. But this rarely seems to succeed. Just think of all the low cost computing device projects for Africa and India.

What won out in the end? Ultra-Low-Cost smartphones, basically offering the same functionality as the western counterparts but with cost drastically reduced by being based on completely domestic chinese designs and Android.

In this case, the problem is rather the education required to use the microscope and interpret the results. A professional will probably manage to finance a $50-$100 microscope, either second hand or as a knock-off, regardless of being in a third world country.

The paper microscope is a great toy or educational device though.

Very cool! Any more detailed information about its construction? I bet they would also be interesting to a different audience - as toy.

Edit: Found this http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1403/1403.1211.pdf

Unfortunately they try to patent it. Let's see how much the patent license will add to the 50 cent and how monopolistic they will act. Le Sigh.

http://www.google.com/patents/WO2013120091A1

Previous discussion here : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7377213

I wonder how soon this will be developed in large quantities. Funding from places like Bill Gates' foundation is almost certain, but there seems to be a lag, as the TED talk is from June 2012, while the arXiv paper [1] as well as the linked post from March 2014. Maybe hitting the 50¢ mark would require lots of units?

[1] http://arxiv.org/abs/1403.1211

Is diagnosis really a problem for health care in the developing world? I would imagine that in places like sub-Saharan Africa, they have a pretty good idea of what the symptoms of malaria look like, and they don't need microscopes so much as they need medicine.

Manu Prakash discussing this on TED: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h8cF5QPPmWU

Wow, great article!

This looks really great! I would love to get my hands on one.