Quote Originally Posted by BWyant View Post
Uh... I do have a buddy that makes apps for phones, but is that actually possible to do?

I mean, if there's money in it and someone was willing to pay him to develop the app, I'm sure he'd do it.

But... How, theoretically, would it work?
Being an electrical engineer I have actually looked into something similar. I tried to make an oscilloscope that ran off my iPhone.

Doing the same with ultrasound requires basically the same things.

1. An app that receives data then displays it on the phones screen. This is the easy part... even with limited knowledge of app coding this can be done.

2. Hardware probe (in my case it was voltage probes, but in this case it would be an ultrasound transducer). This is where things start to get expensive, as this part alone will cost at least $90

3. Completely custom interface between the phone and the ultrasound transducer. This is where costs go through the roof. You need a device that converts the signals from the transducer to ones that the phone can understand then you need to get the data to the phone. There are 3 ways to do so. 1. Bluetooth 2. Wi-Fi 3. Custom cable All three will require custom circuit boards and will add $250 at least.

So all in all the cheapest that this could be done small scale would be around $350 still far cheaper than a full ultrasound machine but it would be extremely limited in what it could do (phones just don't have enough processing power yet) and due to limited volume it just doesn't make sense.