How your smartphone soon may help test for STDs

It’s a small exaggeration to say that a drop of blood is the biggest thing that goes into making this test.

But a new technology could soon allow medical professionals — and perhaps even patients at home — to test for diseases and medical conditions using a smartphone and some dedicated hardware.

Sam Sia, associate professor of biomedical engineering at Columbia University in New York, heads up the team of researchers working on this project. The technology he’s working on might revolutionize lab tests and equipment, transforming the need for large, expensive and immobile lab hardware — instead utilizing inexpensive, micro-sized and portable smartphone-attached devices.

“What we’ve done is try to replicate all the functions of these lab-based instruments into our little dongle,” Sia said.

The dongle, in this case, is a device that plugs directly into a smartphone through the audio jack, making it low-powered and versatile across phone brands. The device tests for a variety of sexually transmitted diseases. With just a finger-prick blood sample collected onto a plastic card, the device can runs tests and return the results in 15 minutes.

These smartphone dongles were first tested on 96 patients in Rwanda, all who were participating in programs to prevent mother-to-child disease transmission. Results of the groups work were published recently in the journal Science Translational Medicine.

“We were trying to diagnose them for HIV and syphilis and other diseases before they can pass those diseases back to the newborn,” Sia said.

The disposable chip uses reagents that test for STDs, but Sia expects the device may eventually be able to test for infectious disease markers, chronic diseases, diabetic markers, some types of cancer and general health and wellness. It’ll even measure hormonal and vitamin levels.

“What we’re looking to do is expand access to ways you can actually monitor your own body. You can actually do this in a pharmacy, you can even do it at home,” Sia said. “That ultimately can save the healthcare system more money, because you don’t have to do these expensive tests at the hospital, which is very infrastructure heavy.”

The benefits aren’t limited to just size and portability, but cost as well: A lab test that normally costs $18,000 could instead be done on a smartphone device that costs $35.

“The hope is that here we can bring the tests down to such a low cost that people can just pay for it themselves,” Sia said.

Sia sees this as an opportunity for consumer electronics companies as well as traditional diagnostic companies, and indeed he is working with some partners to eventually bring the device to market.

But what about the available smartphone apps that already track or address a user’s health? Will this device integrate with those?

“Absolutely there are some considerations there before that can or should be done, such as data privacy,” Sia said. “But certainly from a technical level, that is the vision. I think it’s almost inevitable that vision will happen.”

This story first aired as an interview on Science Friday with Ira Flatow.