Two stripes in one smartphone
Scientists have built a diabetes and pregnancy test into a smartphone
Engineers from Germany modified the camera and flash of a smartphone in such a way that they turned into a multifunctional sensor that will allow women to conduct pregnancy tests anywhere and at any time of the day, and diabetics to monitor blood sugar levels, and presented it in an article in the journal Optics Express (Kort Bremer and Bernhard Roth, Fibre optical surface plasmon resonance sensor system designed for smartphones, in the public domain).
"We now have the opportunity and potential to create small and durable "labs-in-a–chip" that will be miniature enough for use in smartphones," says Kort Bremer from the University of Hanover (in a press release Could Your Smartphone One Day Tell You You're Pregnant? – VM).
Bremer and his colleague Bernhard Roth created an unusual fiber–optic sensor capable of solving many different medical problems using, in fact, improvised means - a camera and a smartphone flash, a fragment of fiber, a plastic bottle cap, a small amount of glue and a special diffraction grating that helped the camera to read the light signal.
The heart of this sensor is the cover, in which a short fragment of a fiber-optic "wire" is embedded, cleaned of a protective layer and covered with a thin layer of silver. When water, blood or other biological fluids enter the lid, the spectrum of light that goes from the phone flash to the camera through the optical fiber will noticeably change, passing through the silver segment and the sample being studied.
Analyzing this spectrum, it is possible to understand whether the diabetic's blood contains too much sugar or insulin, whether there are biomarkers of pregnancy in a woman's urine or some biochemical signs of various diseases and disorders.
According to the authors of the invention, biomedical applications installed on the phone will be able to use the results of such analyses in order to give recommendations on further actions and even indicate the way to the nearest pharmacy or hospital using data from a GPS receiver built into the gadget.
Such a device, as the technique of its manufacture shows, will be an almost free addition to a smartphone, since almost every modern mobile phone has a built-in camera and a primitive LED flash. As German scientists hope, their invention will help in the future to save the lives of dozens of people and help them monitor their health.
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02.07.2015