Smartphone Based COVID-19 Test Developed
by Anjanee Sharma on
January 30, 2021 at 4:20 PM
Researchers are working towards developing a COVID-19 testing method that analyses saliva samples using a smartphone microscope and delivers results in 10 minutes. This method is adopted from the original method that used a smartphone microscope to detect the norovirus.
Biomedical engineering professor Jeong-Yeol Yoon, who led the team, aims to combine the speed of existing nasal swab antigen tests with the high accuracy of nasal swab Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) tests.
The method developed will be used along with a saline swish-gargle test created by Michael Worobey.
The research team believes their method provides cheaper and simpler detection, Traditional methods for detection pathogens are often expensive, involve laboratory equipment or require scientific expertise. The smartphone-based test simply involves a smartphone, a microscope and a piece of microfluidic paper (a wax-coated paper that guides the liquid sample to flow through specific channels).