mHealth: FDA approves incredibly cost-effective mobile ultrasound

An mHealth launch today strikes me as being particularly smart and cost-effective. By combining the computing power of Microsoft smartphones with a reasonably small hardware add-on, Seattle-based Mobisante is releasing what is perhaps the cheapest ultrasound system in the world -  and it has just been approved by the FDA.

What’s the story?

To understand what’s going on here, you need look no further than the two top men in Mobisante. CEO Sailesh Chutani was a senior director for Windows Mobile at Microsoft. CTO David M. Zar has been involved in ultrasound software and hardware design for almost 20 years. And those are the two main pillars of the MobiSante offering: ultrasound and Windows phones.

How does it work?

MobiUS is the name of the product. When you buy it, you get a TG01 Windows Mobile smartphone. It comes with an ultrasound probe attached, and MobiSante’s software on-board. The entire system will cost less than $10k  – in an industry where the average ultrasound unit retails for between $20k and $100k.

Picture from http://mobihealthnews.com

Source: http://www.xconomy.com/seattle/2011/02/03/mobisante-wins-fda-approval-for-ultrasound-on-a-smartphone-technology/

What we think?

For me, this is a true application of mobile healthcare. It’s not just some tracking application. This could allow ultrasounds to be performed much cheaper, in a far greater variety of locations. It applies the processing power of a smartphone in a very intelligent way – by reducing the size of the usually required ultrasound machine to something you can actually put in your pocket.

There are still a lot of challenges for this product – the need for a full USB port to plug the ultrasound scanner into severely limits the number of devices it can work on, for example. But this is an early example of something I think we’ll be seeing a lot of; smartphones with a range of medical sensors that allow previously hospital-bound equipment to go on the road.