Check for Ear Infections with your Smartphone

Kids seem to get an awful lot of ear infections while they’re growing up. And, unless you’re a doctor, you most likely don’t have an otoscope in the cabinet. (It’s the pointy little thing doctors stick inside your ear to see if you have an ear infection or not. Don’t feel bad if you couldn’t remember its name). Without that expensive little tool, it’s pretty hard to tell what’s going on with your child’s (or your own) ear. Thankfully, a company known as CellScope has figured out a way to check ears with a smartphone. All they do is attach a tiny otoscope to the camera of an iPhone 5/5s, and a photo is taken of everything happening inside of the inner ear. Once that photo is taken, it gets sent to a regular doctor who is able to confirm or deny whether an ear infection is present or not. It’s called the Oto Home, and it might save you some needless trips to the doctor’s office.

To be honest, it’s not all that cheap, but neither is going to the doctor when you think about it. Every time you want to ask a doctor to look at the ear photo, it’ll cost you $49 – after the first photo, that is, which is free. And the Oto Home will cost you $79 just to take it home.

Due to different rules and regulations, you can’t buy an Oto Home everywhere just yet. If you’d like to see if you can buy one, click here. As of right now, it’s only available for the iPhone 5/5s, but an iPhone 6 model is supposedly coming soon. It’s unknown whether an Android version will be developed as well.