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by nl 5211 days ago
pg was talking about something different however

See, I don't think he was. "Ongoing diagnosis* doesn't have to mean new tests if you can make the existing tests radically cheaper and easier. Given that existing behaviour is always hard to modify it would seem sensible to try and piggyback on existing behaviour.

Toilets with cancer sensors that would check for bowel cancer everytime you go would be as about as "ongoing" as diagnosis can get.

Maybe toothbrushes could be modified to check for viruses in saliva.

I'm sure there are other easy tests that could be done if you have blood. There are obvious ways that could be integrated into everyday life (for women, anyway).

I've read some studies that showed dogs could be trained to smell cancer. Maybe people would pay to have their clothes sniffed (!) when they have them sent to the laundry.

I've previously suggested (on HN) the idea of payment companies partnering with food outlets and exercise software vendors to log the calories you are buying. That's a good input into diagnosis software too...

I'm sure there are a lot of other ideas - look for low hanging fruit and you can do radically better than the status quo.

1 comments

System on chip PCR machine? The lowest hanging fruit would be miniaturization and better engineering of existing diagnostic machines. At the moment the medical diagnostic market is filled with overly expensive devices that could be easily made cheaper and more efficient (somewhere with a favourable patent/legal regime so you don't get sued to oblivion).