Smartphones are becoming smarter each week, with apps and gadgets capable of tracking your diet and fitness levels, reading credit cards or even locking the door of your hotel room. But now you can add “screening for HIV” feature. That’s right – what used to take several days and cost hundreds, can now be done on your smartphone.
Biomedical engineers at Columbia University invented a low-cost device, which turns your phone into a fully equipped lab, performing a test that quickly detects not one, but three infectious disease markers in just 15 minutes. To give you a clear idea of how incredible this is, let us remind you that traditionally, laboratory tests for HIV or syphilis take up to several days to analyze the data. They also use equipment that normally costs around $18,000. However, the gadget, developed by lead scientists Samuel K. Sia and his team at Columbia’s School of Engineering and Applied Science, costs $34 to develop!
According to the researchers, the small device – you can hold it in your pocket – connects to a smartphone, a tablet or computer, and performs a complete enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) test. It analyzes HIV antibodies, treponemal-specific antibody for syphilis, and non-treponemal antibody for active syphilis infection. The smartphone accessory uses a finger prick of blood and tells you whether you are sick or healthy in just 15 minutes without requiring any extra energy. It takes all the energy it needs from the smartphone, connecting to it through the headphone jack. This means you can use it with any kind of smartphone, including iPhones and Android.
This is a huge breakthrough, considering we can’t even use the same charger for an iPhone 4 and an iPhone 5. Although the revolutionary gadget still looks like a science project and has probably a long way to a market-ready version, it proved its efficiency – not in a lab, but on the field. Researchers tested it on 96 women, enrolled in a program for prevention of mother-to-child disease transmission in Rwanda. In fact, they handed it over local healthcare workers, who after only 30 minutes of basic training used the device without any effort.
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Scientists say the dongle is as affordable as it is effective. It’s also compact, it works fast, and it is compatible with any kind of mobile devices or computers. And it’s a huge step in prevention and detection of infectious diseases, which in today’s world suffering from the likes of HIV, SARS, Ebola or bird flu, is essential. And health experts are excited; we are too.
