Going to the doctor is a pain in the neck for most people. Especially if you are going to just have routine checkups. According to Forbes, Scanadu (not to be confused with Xanadu, the Olivia Newton-John fantasy musical romp from 1980) hopes to lessen the number of times you have to make a trek to the doctor's office with its new smartphone accessories. Scanadu's new devices read vital signs on your body and then transmit them to a smartphone, where they can be analyzed by the company's app in real time.

The company has three such devices in the works: the Scanadu Scout (pictured), which reads vital signs from a person's temples; Project ScanaFlo that can analyze urine; and Project ScanaFlu, which can test a person's saliva for cold or flu symptoms. All three devices are still pending FDA approval before then can be sold to the public, but the Scout appears to be the furthest along in development. Scanadu claims that the device will cost less than $150, and can record and analyze vital information like blood pressure, pulse, heart rate, blood oxygenation, and temperature. All of this data can be captured in less than ten seconds and instantly transmitted to a smartphone for analysis. The company claims that by providing these metrics to users, patients will be able to avoid having to go to the doctor's office as often and therefore save on medical costs.

The company also hopes that by anonymizing the data and sharing it with other users, patients will be able to benefit from crowdsourced experiences in addition to a doctor's guidance. We're not sure how comfortable we are with sharing our urinalysis with a social network of sorts, but if Scanadu has it's way, that may be where things are headed. The company says it hopes to have its devices approved and on the market by the end of next year, and it has more devices in the pipeline.