Using phones to prevent pandemics
By Oli Usher, on 18 November 2014
Rachel McKendry (London Centre for Nanotechnology at UCL) leads a consortium that develops mobile phone-based diagnostic kits. She gave this year’s Rosalind Franklin lecture at the Royal Society, which you can view above.
In this lecture, Professor Rachel McKendry presented her research to create a new generation of mobile phone connected diagnostic tests for infectious diseases. The widespread use of mobile phones could dramatically increase access to testing outside of hospital settings, particularly in developing countries. Professor McKendry also presented the research foundations of a global early-warning system for infectious diseases that links the millions of symptoms that are self-reported on the web each day to mobile phone connected tests, in real-time and with geographically-linked information. This research lies at the cutting edge of infectious diseases, nanotechnology, telecommunications, big data and public health.