Smartphone turns into a medical diagnostic device with new technology
Smartphones have now become crucial for applications in the healthcare industry. It would be a boon for remote health monitoring if smartphones could help diagnose diseases or track medical conditions. Professor Chong Ahn of the University of Cincinnati has built a tiny portable lab device that, when plugged into a phone, automatically connects to a doctor’s office through a custom app developed by UC. The device, which is smaller than a credit card, has a custom plastic lab chip that can use a single drop of blood or saliva to diagnose infectious diseases such as coronavirus, malaria, Lyme disease, or HIV, among many other health conditions including anxiety and depression. The phone equips the lab with the power and test protocol. The research has been published in the Nature journal Microsystems & Nanoengineering.
The process involves the user to put a single-use plastic lab chip into their mouth and then plug it into a slot in the box to examine the saliva. The device automatically transmits results to the patient’s doctor via a custom app created by UC for near-instant results. In the research, Professor Ahn and his team used a smartphone device to test for malaria, although the device could also be employed for point-of-care diagnosis for countless chronic or infectious diseases or for measuring stress hormones. The research team created a lab chip that relies on natural capillary action, which is the tendency for a liquid to adhere to a surface, to draw a sample down two channels known as a “microchannel capillary flow assay.”
One channel combines the sample with freeze-dried detection antibodies, while the other consists of luminescent material that read the results when the split samples mix again on three sensors. Professor Ahn says that the device is accurate, inexpensive, and easy to use. The performance is similar to laboratory tests, but it is cheaper and more user-friendly. They wanted to make it simple so that anyone could use it without having any training or support, he adds.
