Skin Scan iPhone App Scans for Skin Cancer

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Your smartphone might soon help you diagnose illnesses and disease, reminiscent of tricorders used by Dr. McCoy in Star Trek.

Skin Scan is an iPhone application that retails for $4.99, and if it works as designed, it can detect skin cancers like melanoma by analyzing your skin features. The app will take photos of your moles or skin lesions, and uses a proprietary algorithm to determine whether these are potentially cancerous. This is done by analyzing the fractal-like shapes on skin or the shape of the mole. If these are developing abnormally, then a check with your physician might be in order.

Skin Scan also checks for your location, so that it can display mole photos from across the globe. The startup that developed Skin Scan actually received 50,000 Euro (about $71,400) in funding from Seedmoney, which will help develop the product further. The team includes two dermatologists and two mathematicians, so we do hope that the readings and analyses are accurate.