I've devoted a fair amount of focus in recent months to embedded vision's positive impacts on personal health monitoring; to discern pulse rate, for example, along with respiration and blood alcohol content. And thanks to EETimes' Sylvie Barak, I've now got another candidate to add to the list. As one of a series of startups recently funded by IBM, a Romanian company called Skin Scan now offers an Apple iOS app that analyzes and monitors the progression of potential melanoma spots. From Sylvie's writeup:
The $5 application uses the iPhone’s camera to analyze moles and skin lesions, measuring their diameter and performing fractal geometry on them to map their growth pattern…Developed by a Math professor from the Polytechnic University of Bucharest with one of his students and a team of 12, including two dermatologists, Skin Scan plans on implementing a freemium model and expanding its reach to other smartphones too. The six month old company said it has already achieved close to 70 percent accuracy with its algorithm, but hopes more data will help to improve that figure significantly.
