Samuel K. Sia , associate professor of biomedical engineering at Columbia University, New York, using his previously developed lab-on-a-chip  and developed a way to check a patient’s HIV status anywhere in the world, and synchronize the results automatically and instantaneously with central health-care records. And he was able to do it, 10 times faster, researchers say, than the benchtop ELISA, a broadly used diagnostic technique. The device was field-tested in Rwanda by a collaborative team from his lab.

Sia says that this is a major advance towards providing people in remote areas of the world with laboratory-quality diagnostic services usually available only in centralized health care settings.

“We’ve built a handheld mobile device that can perform laboratory-quality HIV testing, and do it in just 15 minutes and on finger-pricked whole blood,” Sia says. “And, unlike current HIV rapid tests, our device can pick up positive samples normally missed by lateral flow tests, and automatically synchronize the test results with patient health records across the globe using both the cell phone and satellite networks.”

“There are a set of core functions that such a mobile device has to deliver,” he says. “These include fluid pumping, optical detection, and real-time synchronization of diagnostic results with patient records in the cloud. We’ve been able to engineer all these functions on a handheld mobile device and all powered by a battery.”

This new technology, which combines cell phone and satellite communication technologies with fluid miniaturization techniques for performing all essential ELISA functions, could lead to diagnosis and treatment for HIV-infected people who, because they cannot get to centralized health care centers, do not get tested or treated.

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