“Can I tell if my son has been using marijuana with this?” asks 9to5Mac‘s Seth Weintraub at the end of the first video attached below.
What he’s taped is a demo by Sam De Brouwer, co-founder of Scanadu, of two prototype iPhone accessories the Silicon Valley-based startup brought to CES last week:
- Scout, a device that records such vital measurements as body temperature, heart rate, blood oxygenation, respiratory rate, ECG, and diastolic/systolic blood pressure and enters them into the iPhone via BlueTooth
- Scanaflo, an iPhone-ready home urinalysis strip that measures levels of glucose, protein, leukocytes, nitrites, blood, bilirubin, urobilinogen, microalbumin, creatinine, ketone, specific gravity and pH. Levels are recorded as colors and input via the iPhone’s camera.
.
“Interestingly,” writes Weintraub, “Scanaflo could easily be upgraded to be a drug/urine testing apparatus which would open up a huge can of worms but also enable parents of troubled teens to know that their children were behaving.”
If Weintraub’s kids were teens — and not 6 and 3 — he might have known that Walgreens already has a shelf full of products that test for a variety of street drugs, from weed to oxycontin.
Below: Weintraub’s YouTube, a Scanadu promotional video and an Economist interview with co-founder Walter De Brouwer, M.D.
.
[youtube=http://youtu.be/3cE9Xc5kqmY]
[youtube=http://youtu.be/KSwMauCno6o]
[youtube=http://youtu.be/AvoI_Qf_FDs]
Follow Philip Elmer-DeWitt on Twitter at @philiped. Read his Apple AAPL coverage at fortune.com/ped or subscribe via his RSS feed.
