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Tuesday, June 16, 2020

Fast smartphone self-test for COVID-19 developed

By depositing a saliva sample on a tiny device attached to your smartphone, you could find out in five minutes if you're infected, say pharmacists at Université de Montréal. The researchers are working on a technique to screen for COVID-19 using a smartphone.

"The person would simply put a saliva sample on a device attached to the phone and get the result in a few minutes," said Xavier Banquy, a professor in UdeM's Faculty of Pharmacy whose team came up with the idea.

The device, which has proven its effectiveness in the laboratory but has not yet been tested in a natural setting, would reduce the normal wait time for COVID-19 tests results and also free up public-health resources by identifying asymptomatic carriers early on.

"Take a hospital staff member who has to go to work, for example," Banquy said. "If he or she tests positive, they could stay home and avoid unintentionally spreading the virus in a high-risk environment."

Working with Plasmetrix, a Montreal-based company specializing in biomedical detection, Banquy's team has come up with a prototype of the device. It's small—about five square centimeters, no bigger than a card reader that connects to a phone.

Technically, it's a miniature spectrometer that uses an imaging technique to detect the presence of a viral load in saliva. In a sample from an infected person, there are between 100,000 and one million particles that can be seen by the eye of the device's camera.

"A different path"

7 comments:

  1. Yea I'm gonna trust THAT!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Ooooh and since it's attached to your smart phone, contact tracing will begin immediately.

    Thanks, but no thanks.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Willingly giving them your dna

    ReplyDelete
  4. nawww i will pass.

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  5. We need to quit calling them smart phone and start calling them what they are. Spy phones

    ReplyDelete
  6. Satellite Monitoring And Remote Tracking

    ReplyDelete
  7. 1:57

    Yup, that's about right!

    Some people get a court ordered ankle bracelet. Some people carry one around voluntarily.

    ReplyDelete

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