Cholesterol gets especially high during the holidays and sometimes blood pressure and a lot of other nasty side effects of too much fat, oil and sugar.
Researchers from New York's Cornell University are currently perfecting a smartphone application and accessory called SmartCARD which is an abbreviation o Smartphone Cholesterol Application for Rapid Diagnostics. Now fitness trackers and calorie counters aren't the only ways smartphones can help people control their lifestyle and keep track of their health.
Mechanical engineering professor David Erickson from Cornell shared that smartphones were the best fit for a device that keeps track of cholesterol count.
He said that the practicality stemmed from the fact that everyone already carries around a smartphone and that only gives people a considerable amount of ready hardware and computational power. It was only logical that they took advantage of this and created SmartCARD.
The cholesterol tracking device SmartCARD works by clamping over the phone's camera. Similar to the standard testing procedure, the individual pricks his or her finger with a lancet and presses a drop of blood onto the cholesterol test strip. The test strip is then inserted into the testing slot on the SmartCARD system and the phone takes a picture of the blood sample for analysis.
Erickson believes that the best thing about SmartCARD is that it will give its users some peace of mind regarding their cholesterol.
The professor named a few of the device's advantages such as that since it took advantage of smartphone-based diagnostics, SmartCARD will immediately give people feedback the moment they want or need it. He emphasized that this would have all the other features of a smartphone built into it, such as having the device track cholesterol over an extended period of time and being able to take notes.
One disadvantage that SmartCARD has yet to overcome is that it doesn't differentiate between HDL and LDL, or good and bad cholesterol.
Professor Erickson's research on cholesterol trackers has been published in the latest issue of the 'Lab on a Chip' journal.
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