A Miniature 'Open Source' Mobile Clinic For The Developing World

Basic medical tests once required a trip to a clinic. These days, anyone can measure their pulse, heart rate, and blood pressure using cheap digital equipment. That's great for people who are curious about their health and even better for people who lack access to formal health care.

Luis Martín's e-Health Sensor Platform shows what can be done when many kinds of health sensors are combined. The result is a miniature mobile hospital. Built with an Arduino board and Raspberry Pi computer, it contains a lot of what you would find in a formal medical facility, but at a fraction of the traditional cost.

"Most of medical devices have high prices and proprietary licenses which makes [it] impossible for a community to develop applications with them," says Martín, an electric engineer graduate from the University of Zaragoza. "I want to give people the necessary tools to develop e-health applications. That can be the basis of a new era of open-source medical products."

"This can be the basis of a new era of open-source medical products."