It’s time to say hello to Dr Cellphone

An IIT professor and his student have come up with a combination of a smartphone application and a device which can record the user’s heartbeat and pulse rate, do the ECG and also tell if one needs to consult a doctor.

An IIT professor and his student have come up with a combination of a smartphone application and a device which can record the user's heartbeat and pulse rate, do the ECG and also tell if one needs to consult a doctor.

All one has to do is download the application on the phone and buy the device, which comes with leads, a stethoscope and a small box.

A patient can attach the leads or the stethoscope to the box, depending on what he wants, and plug in the wire coming out of the box to the headphone port.

"The readings will be displayed on the phone screen and patients can then SMS, MMS or email them to their doctors," says Goutam Saha of IIT-Kharagpur's department of electronics and electrical communication, who, along with his research student Ashok Mandal, has come up with this invention.

Saha and Mandal put in three years of rigorous research before they came up with the product.

"No special training is needed to use the technology. There's an instruction leaflet and the user just has to follow it," Saha said.

According to the inventors, those using basic handsets can also use this facility. However, smartphone users will be able to get the readings quicker.

The application for the invention's intellectual property right, to be owned by IIT-Kharagpur, has been recently filed.

"The discussion with a medical-equipment facturing company based in US and Kolkata is on. It is interested in commercialising our cardiac analysis portfolio. We are planning toadd diagnostic features after multi-centre trials," Saha said.