Your HIV, Syphilis diagnosis is just a finger prick away using a new smartphone app (DETAILS)
Wouldn’t it be great to have a app that you can use in the privacy of your own home to test for illnesses such as syphilis or HIV and get the results in 15 minutes? Well, that’s all a reality now thanks to engineers at Columbia University.
They have invented a smartphone accessory that can detect three markers for sexually transmitted diseases with a finger-prick. The results come out much faster than traditional laboratory tests which can take days to deliver results.
The low-cost smartphone accessory or dongle has already been tried and proved effective after extensive testing in Rwanda, where mother-to-child STD transmission is high. They tested the device on 96 women.
The device was developed by Samuel K. Sia, associate professor of biomedical engineering at Columbia’s School of Engineering and Applied Science, and his team. The device replicates for the first time all mechanical, optical, and electronic functions of a lab-based blood test.
The smartphone accessory performs an enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) without requiring any stored energy as all necessary power is drawn from the smartphone.
“It performs a triplexed immunoassay not currently available in a single test format, HIV antibody, treponemal-specific antibody for syphilis, and non-treponemal antibody for active syphilis infection,” Sia explained in the study published in the journal Science Translational Medicine.
“A full laboratory-quality immunoassay can be run on a smartphone accessory,” Sia noted. This kind of capability can transform how health care services are delivered around the world.
“By increasing detection of syphilis infections, we might be able to reduce deaths by 10-fold. We might be able to scale up HIV testing at the community level with immediate antiretroviral therapy that could nearly stop HIV transmissions and approach elimination of this devastating disease,” the authors concluded.
