Healthy.io Does Accurate Urine testing

I’ve long loved the idea that you can think laterally with smartphones – using their processing power and sensors to do things that were never originally suspected. Some years ago my colleague Dr Andrew Wilson – currently chair of South Cheshire CCG and I came up with an idea for a treatment for tennis elbow. We worked with a programmer Stuart Foster-Hall and developed an app for the iPhone called iTenniselbow. It used the position sensors in the phone to track you doing exercises to help your tennis elbow. You held it in the palm of your hand and it beeped as you moved. It counted the reps you did and it warned you by beeping faster if you were doing them wrong. It was a great idea but alas it didn’t get a lot of publicity and we let it die. But with all the talk of wearables recently I wonder if it’s time to revive it, as no one else seems to be using position sensors to measure the correctness of exercises.

Recently we’ve used the fact that everyone has a smartphone and they all have a camera to enable all our local GPs to take photos of skin lesions on their smartphone cameras and send them to a secure cloud for advice. Years ago we did something similar and we ended up buying surgeries camera and tripods and printers.

Now I’ve come across another ingenious use of the camera. Healthy.io is an Israeli company that has a great idea about what else a camera could be used for. Basically, they came up with the idea of using the camera on a smartphone to more accurately and reliably measure urine dipsticks. For those of you that haven’t had the pleasure, these are thin sticks of plastic that you dip into someones urine, they have 1-10 areas on them that change colour and usually after a minute you read them compared to a reference colour range. They can be notoriously difficult to read. Is it a trace or 1+ or 2+. Often people don’t wait long enough or wait too long.

The idea that Healthy.io have is you dip the stick and press go you put the stick in a surround which has a huge amount of colour panels on it. This allows the camera to have a reference colour no matter what the light conditions. After a minute it beeps and takes the image. It then processes the image and gives you an accurate result.

The result is displayed and can be sent to an EPR if needed. It could be used by a patient or by a health care worker. As it comes with clear instructions the theory is you don’t need to be a nurse to use it.This also means, in theory, you can check who is doing the test, exactly when and how often. Some people are notorious for over testing and won’t admit it and this could be proof. I have heard stories of care workers, saying a test was negative when it wasn’t actually done, or indeed saying a test was positive so the person got antibiotics given when they hadn’t read it properly.

Their website has a great visual demo.

Now use cases? Give them to care homes or patients who regularly get UTIs and let them self-test and only call the GP is positive? It might reduce GP time costs and reduce antibiotic prescribing. Use it in a clinic to speed the process, make it more accurate and automate entry into the EPR.

contact Katherine Ward < katherine @ healthly.io > for more info.