Comment by shutupalready | Hacker News Reader

Comment by shutupalready | Hacker News Reader

Was it really necessary to involve a smartphone at all?

> color change [is] picked up by a set of photocells in the dongle, and the results are then sent to an app

The logic to discriminate a color change could have been handled by a 75-cent microcontroller. Add a cheap display or a couple LEDs to show the test result, plus a cheap AA battery, and you have a self-contained gadget for less cost than creating the smartphone interface.

Pregnancy tests and all sorts of sophisticated chemical test strips don't involve a smartphone.

I'm thinking that the smartphone hookup is either:

(1) a way to add future functionality like maintaining a database of the tests or uploading test results to somewhere (with all the privacy implications and risks of those), or

(2) a marketing ruse since we all know that a smartphone app that does X is way cooler than a old-fashioned self-contained gadget that does X.

An an example of how easily people fall for coolness of having a smartphone do something that doesn't actually need a smartphone, check out this comment to the original article:

"I have been resisting the smartphone trend for years because they are expensive and there was no unique use for them: everything a smartphone did I ALREADY own a gadget for. This changes the game. Now I want a smartphone."

A couple thoughts:

1. The comment you're talking about is from, essentially, someone who doesn't know what they're talking about. This isn't really meaningfully a "game changer" in terms of "Should I buy an iPhone?"

2. Computers are already used to analyze many of these types of diagnostic tests. It may have been easier to port those systems to a smart phone than to develop a new, bespoke microcontroller. Expertise is a cost.

3. There are massive benefits to having this hooked up to a smart phone, and as you have mentioned, much of it goes to extra functionality. During the Ebola outbreak, case reports often had to be dealt with in paper forms processed by hand, which slowed both reporting and contact tracing. From a public health perspective, being able to link test results (deidentified or not) with a central repository at a ministry of health is a big deal.

Imagine the use case of this not as one person and a smart phone testing themselves. Imagine it as one person and a smart phone testing 4 villages over the course of the week, in conjunction with actually getting people treatment.

> 1. The comment you're talking about is from, essentially, someone who doesn't know what they're talking about.

Yes, of course, the person who made that comment is clueless about technology -- just like 90% of the population. The comment shows that most people think it's really cool that the diagnostic device uses a smartphone and don't realize that the smartphone wasn't needed at all.

> 2. ... than to develop a new, bespoke microcontroller.

Nobody needs to develop a new, bespoke microcontroller. You use a tiny cheap off-the-shelf microcontroller (like the PIC) and program it. Based on the information available in the original article, the program might be as simple as light the red LED (positive) if the color sensor indicates it's above a certain threshold and light the green LED (negative) if below a certain threshold. But even very complex algorithms can be ported to microcontrollers.

> 3. Imagine it as one person and a smart phone testing 4 villages

I did say databases and uploading were a possible reason for the smartphone, and do I agree that a smart phone does make sense for the use case of testing a whole village. This doesn't change my original point that a smartphone wasn't really necessary, not even to reduce costs, and might in fact be more expensive than a standalone device. The original article makes a big deal of the smartphone connection without explaining the real reason why the smartphone is there.

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