In new medical research, health experts demonstrated a system that relies on a smartphone’s camera to perform a COVID test, delivering 100 percent accurate results in trials and promising to bring the cost of at-home testing down to just $7 per test. Lately, the focus on smartphones as a tool for detecting medical conditions has increased, with some promising innovations already in the market.
Last year, Google announced that the camera on its Pixel smartphones can measure respiratory and heart rate. The company also created an AI-powered dermatology assist tool that can help identify 288 skin conditions by just clicking a picture with the phone’s camera. With the COVID-19 pandemic showing no signs of abating anytime soon, scientists have been hard at work creating faster and more economical methods to perform testing.
A study by scientists from the University of California, Santa Barbara, detailed a COVID testing method that employs a basic medical kit and a phone’s camera to detect the presence of the coronavirus pathogen. Published on the peer-reviewed JAMA Network Open, the paper says that the smartphone-driven testing system offered the same accuracy as the regular real-time reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (rRT-PCR) test for detecting COVID infection using saliva samples. The test follows what the team calls smaRT-LAMP protocols. To recall, the US government began delivering free at-home COVID tests late last month, but experts say they are not as accurate as RT-PCR tests performed in labs.
Affordable, Accurate, At-Home Testing
The new testing method proposed in the study uses a dish to hold saliva samples, LED lights, a hot plate, and a cocktail of chemicals that includes a fluorescent dye which lights up as the chemical reaction proceeds. The saliva sample is mixed with the special solution containing enzymes and pathogen-specific probes. The plate supplied in the kit then heats the mixture and the whole setup is then covered with LED lights hanging from the top. Once the reaction starts, the phone’s camera clicks photos every 10 seconds and analyses the change in color. The solution reacts to the presence of COVID pathogens, triggering the fluorescent dye to light up accordingly. The Bactiount app then automatically identifies and quantifies the amount of pathogen in the sample to produce a positive or negative COVID test result.
The team says its smartphone-based testing kit costs about $100 (excluding the price of the phone) and can deliver test results in just 25 minutes. Once the kit is purchased, the price of each subsequent test comes down to just $7. Another major advantage of the smaRT-LAMP COVID testing kit is that it can be easily tweaked to detect new COVID-19 strains. There is one key limitation, however. The Bacticount app is currently only compatible with the Samsung Galaxy S9 owing to camera calibration requirements, but there is the expectation that support for more smartphones models could be added.
Sources: JAMA Network Open, Bacticount