Last month, Medgadget announced the development of the Magnifi iPhone adapter from start-up Arcturus Labs (Palo Alto, CA), which connects your iPhone 4 or 4S to optical instruments ranging from microscopes to binoculars and telescopes.
To learn more about the evolution of the Magnifi, we spoke with newlyweds Xianne and Isaac Penny who came up with the rough idea for the device while in grad school at Stanford University. They began the development of the product after graduating. Isaac Penny also worked as an engineer at Intuitive Surgical (Sunnyvale, CA), where he helped create the daVinci Single-Site line of instruments.
Slide image showing normal and cancerous human colon cells..
“Somewhat related to what I was doing for research at Stanford, I was working on medical devices for the developing world,” Isaac Penny says. In the course of that research, he visited a number of clinics in Africa. “A lot of them don’t even have PCs or laptops but they have their cellphones and they were documenting stuff with cell phones, which they would attach to a camera,” he remembers. “Grad students at Stanford do that a lot, too. So we figured maybe other people who use microscopes do as well.”
While the idea was first developed for microscopes, they realized that it would work with other optical instruments such as binoculars and telescopes as well. “Feedback from customers and users that has helped us home in on the product,” Isaac Penny explains.
“There were some unexpected fields where we didn’t see that this would apply to,” Xianne Penny says. For instance, it can be used by optometrists and ophthalmologists because it would fit their slit-lamp microscope. It can also be used by endodontists—dental surgeons who do root canals and use microscopes to look inside the drill hole in teeth to observe what the root looks like from the inside of the tooth.
The device also helps in teaching situations that involve microscopes. With the Magnifi, multiple students can gather around the microscope and view a slide at the same time—instead of taking turns to do so. It also can be used with services such as Skype or Facetime to project images to a projector computer. “You could have a live demo for education in a classroom,” Isaac Penny says.
Slide shows the head of a bedbug.
The functionality of the Magnifi can be further expanded with third-party apps. For instance, apps such as Camera Plus and Camera Awesome enable users to lock the focal length to prevent the potentially annoying autofocus issues. Another app known as Eye Microscope can be used to add scale bars, date and magnification to images taken with the phone.
The device works on eye pieces in the range of 1 to 1.5 inches in diameter. It must also be able to slide over the eyepiece at least 1 inch without obstruction, so that the camera’s optics can get close enough to align.
Arcturus Labs is planning on coming out with another adapter to enable Magnifi to be used for an even wider range of optical instruments, namely spotting scopes and other optics with large diameter eyepieces. The new adapter will be interchangeable with current Magnifi case and future cases within the product line.
Link: Arcturus Labs…
