Portable

When doctors want to see if someone has a certain illness, they may check the patient's blood or urine for the DNA of a specific virus or bacteria, or for a mutated version of the person's own DNA. A new device should make doing so much easier.

Farmers around the world regularly burn post-harvest crop waste, producing a significant amount of greenhouse gases and air pollution in the process. A new portable system, however, can be brought to farms to convert that waste into useful products.

Whether it's an impoverished nation, a battlefield or a disaster site, there are places where doctors have to perform surgery outside of a sterile operating room. That's where the SurgiField system comes in, as it's basically a miniature pop-up O.R.

Presently, in order to check if someone has chronic kidney disease, a urine sample has to be sent off to a well-equipped lab for testing. A new portable device, however, could allow such testing to be performed onsite in remote communities.

MRI is a powerful diagnostic tool, but the size and cost limits where it can be used. A compact, affordable new MRI system uses a much smaller magnetic field and doesn’t require shielding, and is still able to diagnose brain disorders in patients.

Ordinarily, medical ultrasound imaging systems are big and bulky enough that they have to be pushed along on wheeled carts. The new Vave probe, however, can be carried in a pocket and paired with a smartphone.

In people with liver disease or other metabolic disorders, blood ammonia levels can quickly climb to dangerous levels. And unfortunately, checking those levels is not a fast and easy process. A newly developed device, however, could change that.

​Leaves are kind of like nature’s power plants, converting sunlight into energy for the plant. Now a team at Eindhoven University of Technology is using artificial leaves to produce chemicals, which could lead to solar-powered “mini-factories” that can create drugs and chemicals almost anywhere.

Solar chargers are one means of keeping a smartphone charged when in remote locations, but they're dependant on hours of daylight and sunlight intensity. Portable turbines are an alternative and product designer Nils Ferber has created one he says is more portable and effective than any other.

There's now plenty of evidence that sitting for long periods increases mortality risk, even if we exercise regularly. So if you spend your days at a sedentary desk job, the Elevate standing desk might interest you. It combines ergonomics with an elegant design at a price that won't break the bank.

Sandia National Laboratories is working its Mobile Imager of Neutrons for Emergency Responders (MINER) – a nuclear device detector capable of narrowing a search to within a city block without door-to-door sweeps.

SVOne is an add-on that turns an iPhone into a portable eye test lab. Developed by Smart Vision Labs, it is low cost and could improve the lives of millions of people.