“When the smartphone started being used by a lot of people we adapted our design,” says Sia. The goal was to bring diagnostic tests to remote locations that don’t have the money or infrastructure to support large, expensive lab equipment. Sia says that he and fellow researchers started working on the project a decade ago, before smartphones, focusing on miniaturizing the aspects of testing that actually deal with blood and fluids. Each of these zones searches for antibodies or antigens within the blood that indicate the presence of a particular disease. Once the cartridge is inserted into the smartphone-attached device, pressing a large black button sucks the blood down different channels into a number of detection zones.

One of the key goals was to keep power consumption as low as possible so the tool could be used in areas where power isn’t always available or reliable.Ī user collects a drop of blood from a pricked finger into a small plastic cartridge with several tiny maze-like channels. This means the device can also be used with any type of smartphone, and could potentially be powered by less-expensive devices, like iPods and lower-end phones as well. The test kit also gets all the power it needs through the smartphone’s headphone jack, which is also used to transfer data to the app to display and record results. In contrast to the expensive, lab equipment that’s typically used for blood tests, the team says their device should cost just $34 to manufacture and is small enough to hold in the palm of your hand. Sia, associate professor of biomedical engineering at Columbia University, have developed a tiny lab on a chip that, when fed a drop of blood from your finger and plugged into a smartphone, can test for HIV and syphilis in just 15 minutes. In the near future, getting a blood test could be as simple as plugging an accessory into your smartphone and watching half an episode of your favorite sitcom while you wait for the results. The lab-on-a-chip gets the power it needs for testing though the headphone jack on a smartphone, and sends the results through the port to the phone for computation, display and storage.

Athelas blood testing device cost