Carl Heneghan

There's no independent research.

Therefore, the uncertainty is huge around any of what comes out.

And what we are seeing now is a lack of independent research in many areas that matter because it's so expensive to do the research in the first place.

Okay.

Look, Ian, I have a super rant here.

Smartphone apps.

The world is predicated now that your phone is going to diagnose everything for you, save your life.

In fact, you'll be able to connect it into your body and it will do everything.

It will detect AF.

It will detect skin cancers.

You name it, it's going to replace all GPs.

What a load of hokum, to be honest.

And the thing here is this paper.

I've never seen a paper like this.

It's a great systematic review of diagnostic accuracy study of smartphone apps.

um one of the studies in here there are a total of nine studies that evaluated six different iphone identifiable smartphone apps and this is all for skin cancer all for skin cancer and in the results table i've never seen this one of them in 2014 actually had a sensitivity of zero percent so it didn't wasn't able to pick up

Any of the... So that's deeply concerning.

So basically, all of the apps, poor quality, didn't perform as what you want to, yet two of them have CE marking.

Well, that's the marking in Europe that gives you a conformity assessment to be able to place your device on the market and say it's been approved by the European Union.

see market fit to market across all of Europe now one of the things with that is it is a smartphone apps come in what's called class one devices therefore they're considered low risk and therefore all they have to do is show compliance with some essential requirement laws which are very straightforward to do things like you switch it on it performs as intended did you not have to have any clinical data