I worked at a startup making a handheld ultrasound machine back over a decade ago. Even back then we could easily power the transducer using a mobile phone capacity battery, you just need to step up the voltage to around 100v so you could feed it through the transducer and you'd get a signal back.
Last I heard the place is still going although most of the people I worked with have left already.
EDIT: Back then we were eyeing up using MEMS technology instead, though I don't think anything happened with that.
This would be great for animal husbandry. So much guesswork and tracking of schedules would be unnecessary if a veterinarian weren't required e.g. to determine follicle size. I will buy three or four, when they're $100.
Paired with deep learning it would be very helpful for early tumor screening at home. My girlfriend already had cancer twice, but the usual screening is done only once every 6 months.
For the extra keen, here is the Nature Microsystems & Nanoengineering paper about this work released Aug 27 2018:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41378-018-0022-5
Disclosure: one of the co-inventors in the article was my graduate supervisor. I had no relation with this work however.
I hope this reaches hospitals and patients soon. I recently had to pay ~$1k for a transvaginal ultrasound at Stanford Hospital. That is what I paid AFTER insurance, I think the hospital billed the insurance company another $5k or so. Absolute highway robbery, and prohibitive for many people in need of these assessments.
The thing looks pretty fragile -- one of the reasons why they use piezo based systems is they are pretty robust.. I guess I am not clear how this system equates to getting a $100 ultrasound machine.. I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say this system probably is not going to replace normal ultrasound systems for some time.. but could be used to wrap one of these membranes around say your heart and have something like an implantable ultrasound heart monitor..
One still needs expensive FPGA or DSP for beamforming in decent ultrasound machine. Nothing for 100$. Maybe some single channel sensor, but I also doubt that after FDA approval price will stay in 100$ range. Plus I am worried about long time stability of polymers. Moisture or UV or mechanical load can alter polymer’s structure.
Great, now instead of simply googling my symptoms, I can also attempt to read an ultrasound. Image search maybe?
Ok, that is just awesome. There are a ton of uses for low cost ultrasound from trauma care to package inspection.
This is some serious awesome tech!
We'll see if they ship!
The company that is really killing it in this space right now is https://www.butterflynetwork.com/