An international team of researchers from Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, and other institutions, have created an inexpensive diagnostic device that, they say, can be used by health care workers in the world’s poorest areas to monitor diabetes, detect malaria, discover environmental pollutants, and perform tests currently being done by machines costing tens of thousands of dollars.
The device, currently in field trials in India, costs about $25 to produce, weighs just two ounces, and is about the size of a pack of cigarettes. It was modeled after the newest glucose monitoring devices, which are limited to testing blood sugar. The Harvard device can send data over the lower-tech cellphones common in the developing world to distant physicians, who can text instructions back to researchers, government officials tracking outbreaks, and others.
“We designed it to be as close as possible to a glucose meter, because that’s familiar to people,” said Alex Nemiroski, a postdoctoral fellow and lead author of a paper describing the work, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “There are two buttons. Select the test and press ‘go.’ It should be as much of a no-brainer as possible.”
The scientists from Harvard, along with the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, and the University of Oviedo, Spain, worked on the device over nearly three years. Now, they say, they are turned the device over to entrepreneurs interested in commercializing the technology.
The device focuses on an electrochemical detector, which measures the voltage or current generated in liquids for characteristic signatures of the liquid’s contents. By applying a small amount of electricity to a drop of blood mixed with a reagent, the device can gauge glucose levels. The same goes for heavy metals in water, malaria antigens in blood, and sodium in urine.
Samples are measured in drops and just a small amount of reagent is needed for each test. The device uses vibration to mix samples.
The project had three objectives: to make a technologically versatile, hand-held electrochemical reader that was inexpensive and rugged; to use this device to do a range of assays relevant in public health, diagnostics in resource-limited environments, and testing for safety and quality of water, food, and other health-related materials; and to make the information provided by the analysis easily uploadable to the Web over even low-end (G-2) cellphones.
They created software that converted the data to audible tones so it could be sent as if it were someone’s voice. The data is then sent over the phone’s audio network to a physician, database, or other recipient.
