Future touchscreens could be a portable lab

They say that our fingers and hands are one of the dirtiest parts of our bodies, after all, who knows how many doorknobs, handles and buttons that you have come into contact with today, and multiply it with the thousands and millions of people who have done the same as you? Having said that, with touchscreen devices being so common, such bacteria and other nasties too, don’t mind residing on your glossy screen – and this is where researchers from the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) worked on an interesting low-cost concept that is capable of performing microscopic analyses thanks to a smartphone’s touchscreen display.

Taking into account the advantage of the capacitive touchscreen, through applying a bio-sample like blood, saliva, and even urine from a LOC cartridge to the screen, this group of researchers fully intend to see the smartphone’s screen register specific changes in its capacitance, which will be an indication of what the sample contains. This would mean the phone will be able to perform the analysis and send a report of the results almost instantaneously. Still in the proof-of-concept stage, it might just make touchscreen phones a compulsory purchase for all budding pathologists should it materialize in the real world, don’t you think so?

Doxie Go standalone portable scanner syncs with iOS devices

Apparent is updating its line of portable scanners with the Doxie Go, a lightweight, standalone unit with enough on board storage for up to 600 pages or 2400 photos and the ability to scan directly to an external drive or sync scans to iPad and iPhone without the need for a computer escort.

While Doxie's previous effort - the Doxie U portable scanner - came decorated with pink love hearts that would sit nicely next to a poster of Justin Beiber, the Go takes on a more executive look with its streamlined white finish.

Measuring 10.5" x 1.7" x 2.2" (26.7 cm x 4.35 cm x 5.6 cm) and weighing in at 14.2 oz (403g), the Go has a rechargeable lithium-ion battery that's good for consuming about 100 documents before it needs recharging and scan speed is specced at eight seconds per full-color page, so it's not lightning quick.

The company's included Doxie 2.0 software automatically syncs scans to your computer when connected via USB and is set up for simple transfer to Evernote, Dropbox, Flickr and Google Docs. There's also automatic recognition, cropping, rotation and contrast adjustment, a "software stapler" tool for creating multi-page documents and ABBYY® OCR (Optical Character Recognition) technology which is designed to create easily searchable PDFs that can be copied and pasted.

JPEG and PNG files can also be created while an SD slot adds to the Doxie Go's storage expansion options.

Recharging is via USB and a full recharge takes about 2 hours, but if you need to get on the road again in a hurry there's a charging kit available for US$19.

The Doxie Go is slated to hit shelves in late November at a price of $US199.

There's little detail at this stage on the iPhone/iPad Sync Kit except that it enables you to upload scanned files directly into your photo roll. The kit will be released in December and will set you back a further $US39. The ABBYY® OCR functionality will also be available in December as a software upgrade.