Can examining your mobile phones tell you how healthy you are?

Mobile phones have revolutionized communication in the 21st century, and the fact that they carry a person’s microbial flora has led to the suggestion that they could indeed serve as sensors for personal health, too.

Mobile phones, or handys as we call them here in Germany, are remarkably the most common electronic devices across the world. As a carrier of an ancient Nokia phone with the sufficient technology to make calls and send texts, I am constantly mocked by my “evolutionarily superseded” smartphone-using friends. Well, smartphone users, your phones have finally served a purpose.

In a recent study conducted by Meadow et al., the microbial composition of touchscreens from the hand phones of 17 individuals was compared with the owners’ skin flora (from index finger and thumb). DNA was isolated from the swabs of the subjects and their phones, and a culture-independent sequencing technique was used to identify the microbial community in both the cases. At the institute where I work, we routinely identify staphylococcal carriage with the help of the humble swab of the individual. So one might ask, why swab cell phones when you could rather get a better understanding of the microbiota by direct sampling? The broad aim of the study was in fact to determine if these modern accessories could serve a higher purpose – help non-invasively determine an individual’s microbiome. Having your throat, nose or any of your insides swabbed is not a pleasant experience!

So what was found through this research was that people indeed share their microbial flora with their phones, and 5 % of this phone-associated community (on average) is unique, i.e., the microbiome of an individual's phone corresponds with his or her own skin microbiome – and this connection is surprisingly stronger in women than in men. Unfortunately, the study has inherent limitations such as small sample size and exclusion of phones with keypads among others, as pointed out by the authors themselves.  

Several studies have been previously carried out to investigate the colonization of pathogenic bacteria on electronic devices in clinical settings, and have established the risks that mobile technologies pose in transmitting virulent bacteria between individuals. The study by Meadow et al., however, looks at a non-clinical setting and does not confine to any particular bacterial species. It is therefore very interesting to note that there exists a personal microbiome on an individual’s personal effects.

The idea of using mobile phones as sensors of personal health was somehow initially inconceivable for me; after some thinking, it did not seem so farfetched. Mobile phones themselves were once considered improbable and unsustainable inventions.  So who knows? Maybe, cheap sequencing technologies will indeed help develop non-invasive personal microbiome sensors!

References

Meadow et al. (2014) Mobile phones carry the personal microbiome of their owners. DOI: 10.7717/peerj.447

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