Cue is a $199 at home medical lab you use with your smartphone

Imagine a world where you can test yourself for the flu, check your fertility, or a vitamin deficiency at home with your smartphone.

That’s the world that the creators of the Cue are envisioning.

By using a small sample of saliva, blood, or nasal fluid, you’ll be able to give yourself a medical test and find out what’s ailing you. In addition to finding out whether or not you’re ill, the Cue can also measure your testosterone levels, see if you have a vitamin deficiency, or let you know when your ovulating.

Creator of the Cue, Ayub Khattak, wants to get Beta units of the lab-in-a-box out to users as early as 2015, for a price of $199. The futuristic-looking white cube will transfer the results to your smartphone via bluetooth and will be able to test for fertility, inflammation, testosterone, the flu, and vitamin d levels. You’ll be able to save yourself a trip to the doctor, and possibly some time in the process. The vitamin D test on the Cue, for example, only takes 10 minutes to give you results, and the flu test is three times faster than one you would normally get in a lab. Khattak believes that just from flu tests alone, the Cue will make a significant impact in people’s lives:

“There are over 140 million doctor visits for cold and flu symptoms every year in the US. In more than 31 million of those visits, the patient has flu…we want to enable people to get this health information in minutes and, if flu is detected, communicate their result to their doctor who can order a prescription to the local pharmacy.”

The Cue uses universal cartridges for each test. The cartridges are non-reusable, and will run you $20 for five of them, with the flu test ones costing you $30 for 3. Eventually, Khattak wants the Cue’s cartridges to be subsidized by US healthcare plans like Medicare, as well as people’s medical insurance.

Currently, the cue hasn’t met with FDA approval, so the device can’t be purchased in stores, and must be classified as an “investigational device”.

Health-related smartphone products are in vogue now; both Apple and Samsung are heavily betting on giving users the ability to monitor their own vitals using wearables.

Do you think that products like the Cue will ultimately help us lead healthier lives? Or give us a bunch of data that we’re not qualified to accurately interpret?

Source | Via