Associate Professor Matthew Hill, Dr Mahdokht Shaibani and Professor Mainak Majumder with the lithium-sulphur battery design.
The mobile health tool plugs into your phone to diagnose illnesses such as coronavirus
Using your phone to diagnose disease or track your medical condition is the holy grail for remote health monitoring.
So far it’s been impractical to combine the two in a single device. Tech companies don’t want the regulatory headaches that would come from labeling phones medical devices.
But University of Cincinnati engineers have come up with the next best thing.
UC professor Chong Ahn designed a tiny portable lab device that plugs into a phone, connecting it automatically to a doctor’s office through a custom app UC developed. With a single drop of blood or saliva on a custom plastic lab chip UC designed, the device smaller than a credit card can diagnose infectious diseases such as coronavirus, malaria, HIV or Lyme disease or countless other health conditions like depression and anxiety.
The phone provides the power and test protocol to the lab chip. A patient simply puts a single-use plastic lab chip into his or her mouth then plugs that into a slot in the box to test the saliva.
The device automatically transmits results to the patient’s doctor through a custom app UC created for nearly instant results.
In his latest study, Ahn and his research team used the smartphone device to test for malaria. But the device could be used for smart point of care testing for countless chronic or infectious diseases or to measure hormones related to stress.
“Everybody has a phone – more than 3 billion people,” Ahn said. “So how can we use that technology to test for infectious diseases such as coronavirus? It’s a rapid diagnostic tool you can use at home. Right now it takes several hours or even days to diagnose in a lab, even when people are showing symptoms. The disease can spread.”
Ahn’s study on malaria was published in January in the Nature journal Microsystems & Nanoengineering.
The project demonstrates UC’s commitment to research as described in its strategic direction called Next Lives Here.
This is the future of personal healthcare.
Sthitodhi Ghosh,UC engineering student
Ahn is an electrical and biomedical engineering professor in UC’s College of Engineering and Applied Science. He directs two centers on campus, the Engineering Research Center Cleanroom and the Ohio Center for Microfluidic Innovation. UC honored him last year as a distinguished research professor.
His research team created a novel lab chip that uses natural capillary action, the tendency for a liquid to adhere to a surface, to draw a sample down two channels called a “microchannel capillary flow assay.” One channel mixes the sample with freeze-dried detection antibodies. The other contains a freeze-dried luminescent material to read the results when the split samples combine again on three sensors.
Ahn said the device is accurate, simple to use and inexpensive.
“The performance is comparable to laboratory tests. The cost is cheaper. And it’s user-friendly,” Ahn said. “We wanted to make it simple so anyone could use it without training or support.”
UC doctoral student Sthitodhi Ghosh, the study’s lead author, said the biggest advancement in the device is in the novel design of its tiny channels that naturally draw the sample through the sensor arrays using capillary flow. Ahn is Ghosh’s Ph.D. advisor.
“The innovation of this device is using a capillary-driven microfluidic lab chip,” Ghosh said. “So the entire test takes place on the chip automatically. You don’t have to do anything.
“This is the future of personal healthcare,” Ghosh said.
While the device has applications for diagnosing or monitoring viruses or other diseases, Ahn said he sees potential in the field of mental health. Mental health providers already use smartphones to track the wellness of patients through regular surveys. But psychosocial data can be subjective.
Ahn recalled the excruciating stomach ache he felt when he was hospitalized for an infection. He had trouble translating how he felt on a pain scale of 1 to 10 for his doctors. The pain left him feverish and soaked in sweat, but he reasoned it could surely be worse.
“I said, ‘I’m a 2’ so they didn’t give me pain medicine. My wife says, ‘Honey, you almost died! Take the pain medicine.’ So from then on I said I was a 6 or 7 and I got pain medicine and I was good,” he said.
By routinely testing hormones or other biomarkers associated with depression or anxiety, Ahn said he could help doctors correlate how patients feel with actual changes in their biochemistry. This could improve treatment for countless patients, he said.
And the device can use saliva as well as blood, which is less invasive and stress-inducing than a finger prick.
“If you’re stressed from doing a finger prick, it’s already creating a bias in the testing of stress,” Ghosh said. “That’s why we’re moving to a noninvasive method.”
Ahn is pursuing a patent to commercialize his device. Medical diagnostics company Mico Biomed, which has offices in Cincinnati, is a co-author of the study.
The biggest hurdle could be making people feel confident and comfortable enough to use the unfamiliar device at home, he said.
But the vast amounts of data collected from the tests over time could help psychiatrists better understand the biochemistry underlying mental illness, which could lead to better evidence-based treatments, he said.
“My dream for the rest of my career at UC is to improve public and mental health by providing a new mobile health tool,” he said.
The Latest Updates from Bing News & Google News
Go deeper with Bing News on:
Remote health monitoring
- Remote Patient Monitoring Software Global Market SIZE 2021 | OPPORTUNITIES, REGIONAL OVERVIEW, TOP LEADERS, REVENUE AND FORECAST TO 2026on April 19, 2021 at 7:29 am
This is a professional and in depth study on the current state of the Remote Patient Monitoring Software Market with a basic overview of the industry including definitions classifications applications ...
- AMC Health, Superior Leader in Remote Patient Monitoring (RPM) and Telehealth Adds Dean Panovich as Chief Revenue Officeron April 19, 2021 at 5:43 am
AMC Health, the leader in telehealth and remote patient monitoring (RPM), providing access to care for Payers, Providers, and the ...
- Remote Patient Monitoring for Managed Care ACOon April 18, 2021 at 11:03 pm
Managed Care ACO clinicians can provide remote patient monitoring telehealth and virtual care services to patients with acute and chronic conditions and for patients with only one disease Simon Censon ...
- Handsfree Health’s Hipaa Compliant Voice Platform Now Enables remote Patient Monitoringon April 15, 2021 at 6:13 am
HandsFree Health ™, provider of WellBe®, a secure, HIPAA compliant, voice-enabled virtual health assistant platform, today announced the launch of its Remote Patient Monitoring (RPM) Service.
- Breaking Down FDA’s New Remote Monitoring Strategyon April 14, 2021 at 5:00 pm
FDA uniformly refers to its remote monitoring activities as “remote interactive evaluations ... the guidance document will only remain in effect for the duration of the COVID-19 public health ...
Go deeper with Google Headlines on:
Remote health monitoring
Go deeper with Bing News on:
Diagnosing infectious diseases
- Therapeutic drug monitoring guides the management of patients with chronic non-infectious uveitis treated with adalimumab: a retrospective studyon April 17, 2021 at 5:00 pm
Aim To assess the relevance of therapeutic drug monitoring (TDM) of adalimumab (ADA) treatment for the control of intraocular inflammation and treatment adjustment in chronic non-infectious uveitis ...
- Biotechnology and Sustainability: The Fight Against Infectious Diseaseon April 13, 2021 at 1:34 pm
This report presents a selection of examples of how biotechnology and genomics science has been used to fight infectious disease. These are presented as case studies and are based on discussions at ...
- NIH trial of anti-CD14 antibody to treat COVID-19 respiratory disease beginson April 13, 2021 at 11:23 am
The study will enroll between 300 and 350 hospitalized COVID-19 patients aged 18 years or older at 10 to 15 sites nationwide.
- Fungal disease diagnosis is lifesaver for patients with HIV and AIDSon April 13, 2021 at 6:34 am
A fungal disease diagnostic and educational program has had a transformational impact on the mortality of HIV patients in Guatemala, according to new research.
- COVID-19 measures likely led to foodborne disease decline in Spainon April 12, 2021 at 9:00 pm
Social distancing to combat COVID-19 has led to a decrease in foodborne infections in Spain, according to researchers. Data from the Epidemiological ...