The Vodafone Americas Foundation recently announced the 3 Winners from it's Wireless Innovation Project, a new initiative that identifies and funds unique innovations using wireless related technology offering the best potential to address critical social issues around the world. The three winning innovations will share in prizes totaling up to $700,000 USD to support their next phase of advancement and implementation.

We interviewed the 3 Winners projects, to share with you their ideas, work, and innovativations.   Learn more about CelloPhone below in this interview with Aydogan Ozcan!

How did you get involved in this Project?

Looking at small objects like cells within a compact platform without using any lenses has always been at the focus of my research interests. For quite some time I was working on various methodologies to be able to image and monitor cells within a cost-effective and compact telemedicine unit. Towards this end, the Vodafone Americas Foundations wireless innovation project provided a great opportunity for us to further take it into practice.

How does your invention work?

Our Wireless Innovation Project describes the development of a revolutionary high-throughput and compact optical cell counting and characterization platform termed "Lensless Ultra-wide-field Cell monitoring Array platform based on Shadow imaging" (LUCAS) that will be used to specifically analyze bodily fluids within a regular cell phone.

The LUCAS platform of this project permits detection of the digital holograms of cells or bacteria of interest within any solution of interest using a regular cell phone. Holographic shadow signature of a given cell/bacteria sample provides an extremely rich source of information regarding the count, type and state of the sample.

This high-throughput imaging platform is quite innovative in several ways:

1. It does not require any lenses or other bulky mechanical components; and therefore offers a very compact and cost-effective imaging platform that can easily be merged with existing cell phones.
2. The field of view that LUCAS can monitor without any lenses is >10 cm^2, which is more than 100 fold larger than any existing optical microscope.
3. LUCAS can monitor a depth-of-field of ~0.5 cm which further improves its throughput by ~10 fold when compared to lens based optical imaging.

These major advantages imply that the LUCAS platform can improve the throughput of optics based medical tests by orders of magnitude for detection of diseases such as malaria even within a lensfree and cost-effective wireless unit, such as a commercial cell phone device.

What are you most excited about in this work?

In resource limited settings, such as in the villages of Africa, there exists no infrastructure to conduct even very simple medical tests such as blood counts. To combat various infectious diseases such as malaria and HIV there is an urgent need to be able to analyze bodily fluids such as whole blood samples in a cost-effective and simple way that can even be conducted by minimally trained personnel.

For instance for HIV+ patients, World Health Organization recommends that the patient is tested every few months for his/her CD 4 Tcell Lymphocyte count to assess the course of the disease. This is also a vital test to understand when to start the anti-viral drug therapy and to understand how the patient responds to it.

Likewise, monitoring the white blood cell and red blood cell count is also critical for assessing drug toxicity for antivirals and the treatment diagnosis of many other infectious diseases. For such blood tests to be performed in the field, we need wireless technologies that can capture the micro-scale signatures of various blood cells even at resource poor settings. And cell phones offer a great match for this purpose. Our innovative wireless-health technology that runs on a regular cell-phone would significantly impact the global fight against infectious diseases in resource poor settings such as in Africa, parts of India, South-East Asia and South America.

Through wide-spread use of this revolutionary technology, the health care services in the developing countries will be significantly improved making a real impact in the life quality and life expectancy of millions.

How can those interested in collaborating get in contact with you?

To learn more on our work, potential collaborators should visit:

• http://innovate.ee.ucla.edu/
• http://innovate.ee.ucla.edu/refereed-journal-publications.html
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HTC2k7p8OrI

In these websites, you would find links to various sources of information on our technology and its potential use and applications. After a significant interest has been generated we usually establish a teleconference to further discuss the potentials of a joint effort.