Google Inc. is expanding its presence in the medical technology market.

According to a report Sunday by GeekWire, the search giant has acquired Senosis Health Inc., a Seattle-based startup focused on harnessing mobile devices for medical diagnosis. It was founded by five healthcare and technology experts from the University of Washington. Among them is MacArthur Fellow Shwetak Patel, who had previously established an energy sensor company called Zensi Inc. that got picked up by Belkin International Inc. in 2010.

Patel and his co-founders have developed a collection of apps that use smartphone sensors to check for health issues. Senosis’ OsteoApp, for example, measures the vibrations that pass through a user’s arm when an elbow is tapped to assess bone strength. Another application called HemoApp can turn a smartphone camera into a sort of touch spectrometer, measuring hemoglobin levels based on how light from the flash illuminates the skin.

The idea behind these tools is to make medical screening more accessible. Mobile sensors are hardly perfect, but a test performed with a smartphone can potentially be life-saving in situations when it’s not possible to perform a lab assessment or the results would take too long to come back.

As of February, Senosis was waiting on the Food and Drug Administration to approve its apps for clinical trials. The startup reportedly also started negotiating with “leading venture capital firms” about a funding round at some point along the way. Google’s acquisition offer was apparently attractive enough to cut the talks short.

The sources who leaked word of the deal to GeekWire said that Patel and his colleagues will join the search giant to continue their work. However, Senosis won’t be moving under the wing of the Verily division that oversees most of Alphabet Inc.’s healthcare projects. One of the tipsters said that the team will instead help launch a new “digital health effort based in Seattle.”

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