A medical lab in your smartphone

The digital age has made what was was once obscure visible. In ways we never could before, we can quantify the world—make it knowable to us, comprehensible to us—by gathering data and identifying patterns and generally converting experience into information. One of the last things to have its outlined sharpened through data's lens, though, has been the object most intimate to us: our own bodies. Medical practice, while still largely undertaken in hospitals and doctors' offices, is expanding out into patients' day-to-day lives. At the TED conference in Long Beach this week, former MIT student and current entrepreneur Myshkin Ingawale introduced uChek, which is, as its name (sort of) hints at, a urine-testing app.