Dial Up a Diagnosis

The next time you call, text, or surf, you may be holding the future of disease diagnosis in the palm of your hand. Researchers around the world are developing smartphone applications to enable fast, inexpensive, accessible, non-invasive detection for a wide range of diseases. A consortium led by Hossam Haick, from the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology (Israel) is developing a product that, when coupled with a smartphone, will be able to screen the user’s breath for early detection of life-threatening diseases.  The SNIFFPHONE project links breathalyzer screening technology to the smartphone, utilizing micro- and nano-sensors to read exhaled breath and transfer the information through the attached mobile phone to an information-processing system for interpretation. The data is then assessed and disease diagnosis and other details are ascertained.   Separately, Samuel K. Sia, from Columbia University (New York, USA), and colleagues have devised a low-cost smartphone accessory that can perform a point-of-care test that simultaneously detects three infectious disease markers from a finger prick of blood in just 15 minutes. The device replicates, for the first time, all mechanical, optical, and electronic functions of a lab-based blood test. Specifically, it performs an enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) without requiring any stored energy: all necessary power is drawn from the smartphone. It performs a triplexed immunoassay not currently available in a single test format: HIV antibody, treponemal-specific antibody for syphilis, and non-treponemal antibody for active syphilis infection.  The study authors submit that: “The overall system aims to be portable, robust, low-power, and fully utilize the ability of mobile devices for bringing better health care to resource poor areas.”