Tenets towards smartphone-based medical tricorders

Abstract

There is a vision for smartphone-based medical tricorders, in which a software application can be downloaded to smartphones around the world in people's pockets to use for medical sensing at the point of care. The power of this vision is that a quick software update could allow any phone to count coughs, track anemia, detect sleep apnea, and much more. It has the potential to enable remote healthcare effectively and equalize the reach of care. However, there is a need for further discussion around the implicit difficulties to developing and deploying medical sensing applications. The reality is that every smartphone is different, and that an application developed for one phone has no guarantee of working for the next phone or even the next OS update. In this paper, our goal is to draw out motifs around the challenges that are inherent to realizing this vision of smartphone-based medical sensing solutions. We further expound on this by juxtaposing the challenges with potential futures that we organize as tenets for how we could achieve more sustainable and universal development towards smartphone-based medical tricorders.