Washington State University researchers have developed a low-cost, portable laboratory on a phone that works nearly as well as clinical laboratories to detect common viral and bacterial infections.
Washington State University researchers have developed a low-cost, portable laboratory on a phone that works nearly as well as clinical laboratories to detect common viral and bacterial infections.
The work could lead to faster and lower-cost lab results for fast-moving viral and bacterial epidemics, especially in rural or lower-resource regions where laboratory equipment and medical personnel are sometimes not readily available.
Led by Lei Li, assistant professor in the School of Mechanical and Materials Engineering, they have published their work in the journal, Clinica Chimica Acta. Collaboration with Ping Wang, associate professor of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine, enabled the design and implementation of the key clinical validation study.
Symptoms, judgment, waiting
In rural or underserved areas, doctors sometimes must rely on a patient’s symptoms or use their own judgement in looking at test sample color results to determine whether a patient has an infection. As expected, this process is often inaccurate. If they send results off to a lab in a distant city, the doctors sometimes must wait for days — by which time the infection may have become widespread. Most existing mobile health diagnostic devices, meanwhile, can only analyze one sample at a time.
Read more at Washington State University
Image: WSU Professor Lei Li and graduate student Yu-Chung Chang (l-r) test the new smartphone that detects 12 common viral and bacterial infectious diseases. (Credit: Washington State University)
