At home sonogram with a smartphone Patch#

Each day at dawn, its roustabouts drive a truck loaded with collapsible tents into a different village and erect them on whatever flat ground they find - perhaps a patch of goat-gnawed grass between the school and the church. Kihefo runs what might be described as a traveling medical circus. Cherniak’s team has found other fascinating uses for the devices - which they deployed under conditions almost as stark and dusty as those found in battlefield medicine. Cherniak founded six years ago it works closely with Kihefo, a medical charity based in western Uganda.įor now, the scanners are primarily used to check for pneumonia, which is a major killer of children in poor countries and is frequently misdiagnosed. Several went to Bridge to Health, a Canadian charity that Dr. He has donated scanners to medical charities working in 13 low-income countries, seven of them in Africa. “We’d love to be able to save lives the way doctors do, but we can’t - so every tweet from Africa about the Butterfly is an incredible adrenaline shot for us.” “My team is engineers and computer scientists,” he said. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is one of his backers, as are the investment arms of other family philanthropies. “When you put something on a chip, the price goes down and you democratize it.” “Two-thirds of the world’s population gets no imaging at all,” he added. “That was my real motivation for making it,” said Jonathan Rothberg, Butterfly’s founder, who initially pursued the goal because one of his daughters had a disease that caused kidney cysts needing regular scans.

At home sonogram with a smartphone