Those precious bodily fluids of yours can reveal a lot about your health, as any doctor will tell you. Urine analysis, for example, can give you early warnings about trouble brewing in your liver or kidneys. It can also tell you if your diet is on the wrong track, and if you're at risk for diabetes.

But can you get a heads-up about such medical problems in the privacy of your own bathroom, with a smartphone in hand?

Enter Uchek, a forthcoming iPhone and Android app. Launched on stage at the TED Conference underway this week in Long Beach, Calif., Uchek will reveal potential health issues in your urine, using nothing but commercially available test strips and a couple of smartphone snapshots.

"Everybody pees, and everybody carries a cellphone," explains Myshkin Ingawale, the co-founder of med tech company Biosense Technologies. "We figured we had to be able to do something with this."

There are a couple of problems with those commercially available test strips: They're hard for you to examine on your own, and they consist of 10 confusingly colored pads that intentionally change color a couple of times after you dip them in urine.

What's more, to get a proper read on them, doctors and hospitals have to buy one of six expensive urine-analysis machines — all of which are incompatible with anything but their own brand of urine strips.

Uchek reads the color of those strips the way other apps read barcodes or QR codes. The app asks you to take a couple of shots of the strips at intervals of a few minutes. It then delivers the chemical composition of your pee, what that means, and how it is changing over time.

Ingawale drew laughter and applause from the TED crowd by testing the app live on stage, using a bottled sample provided by an audience member. He joked that he was planning to call the app "iPee."

But there's a serious purpose to all this: making medical testing simpler, cheaper, and universally available. At last year's TED conference, Biosense Technologies unveiled a "bloodless" blood test for anemia that costs 20 cents a shot.

Watch Ingawale give that talk below, and let us know in the comments if this is an app you'd be willing to pay for.

Image courtesy Biosense Technologies