10 Futuristic Smartphone Features That Will Appear Soon

6. Medical Apps To Fight Cancer, Malaria And Ebola

Medical apps already exist for sufferers of rheumatoid arthritis and Parkinson's disease to precisely track when they're experiencing pain or shakiness. More recently, scientists developed an app called Athelas, which with a lens attachment can track malaria and cancerous cells in your blood in seconds.

On a bigger scale, scientists have suggested that phones should be used to track highly infectious diseases like Ebola to get a more precise picture of how they spread. Using a cheap, simple phone add-on called a PCR, which tags pathogens in the blood using a dye, a diagnosis of the disease could be made by anyone within a couple of hours, then automatically uploaded from a person's phone to an online database.

Combine such simple technologies with the growing presence of heart-rate, blood pressure, and other health-tracking features on phones, and its little wonder that scientists are hailing smartphones as having the potential to trigger a medical revolution. Big data is changing the world, and smartphones are its foot-soldiers.