Cellphone sensor could test for COVID-19 in people and on surfaces, researchers say
Lack of testing has plagued the U.S. since the onset of COVID-19 — but researchers are working to change that.
An electrical and computer engineering professor at the University of Utah is working to develop a portable senor about the size of a quarter that can detect the coronavirus in people, on surfaces and possibly even “in floating microscopic particles in the air,” according to a university news release.
“It can be made to be a standalone device, but it can also be connected to a cellphone,” the professor, Massood Tabib-Azar, said in the release. “Once you have it connected either wirelessly or directly, you can use the cellphone software and processor to give a warning if you have the virus.”
Tabib-Azar initially developed the technology to test for the Zika virus, according to the release.
But in April, the National Science Foundation gave him a $200,000 Rapid Response Research grant to convert the technology for use on the coronavirus.
Testing for the virus in the U.S. emerged as an issue as the coronavirus began to spread and continues to be a hot topic as states begin to reopen.
At its highest point, The Atlantic’s COVID Tracking Project shows just over 300,000 new tests were issued on a single day in April. Until recently, that number hovered closer to 150,000, but the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports far fewer.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, previously said the U.S. needs to double its testing efforts going into May, CNN reported.
According to the University of Utah’s news release, testing for COVID-19 requires a “6-inch swab” to be “inserted through the nose to the back of the cavity for 15 seconds.” It can take up to a week for the results to come back.
But Tabib-Azar’s sensor — using only a drop of saliva — would take 60 seconds, the university said.
Users need only plug the sensor into their cellphone’s charging port and launch the app before placing a drop of saliva onto it.
According to the abstract from the National Science Foundation grant proposal, the sensor will then change color or otherwise “visually indicate the presence of COVID-19” in a way that “can be viewed with the naked eye.”
The results would also appear on the phone, the news release states.
Users can test for the virus on a surface “by brushing a swab on the surface and then on the sensor.”
It’s designed to be reusable — either by destroying the previous sample using an electrical current that would disintegrate the virus or by using disposable sheets — and Tabib-Azar said it won’t use much battery power from the cellphone to operate.
Researchers could also use it to help track outbreaks in a given area, provided the results are uploaded to a central server, according to the university.
The same technology and a prototype for the Zika virus was already developed, the news release states, meaning a prototype for a similar COVID-19 sensor could be ready for clinical trails “in two to three months.”
Tabib-Azar told Deseret News that Zika and the coronavirus “are more or less kind of the same shape.”
“Coronavirus is 10 times larger than the Zika, so it is slightly easier to make sense of devices that detect larger things than smaller ones,” he told the newspaper. “So in that sense, the sensors that we are developing now are going to be slightly easier than the Zika virus sensor.”
If the device gets past clinical trials and is approved for commercial use, Tabib-Azar said it would sell for about $50 to $60, Deseret News reported.
Researchers at the University of Cincinnati are working on something similar.
According to IEEE Spectrum’s biomedical engineering blog, researchers there are adapting a smartphone-based test used on Malaria for COVID-19.
A drop of blood or saliva would reportedly produce results in less than 20 minutes, but testing, clinical trials and manufacturing would take between six months and a year, Chong Ahn, an electrical and biomedical engineer working on the project told the blog.
Still, he told IEE Spectrum that “rapid point-of-care testing will be critical for handling pandemic diseases like coronavirus now and in the future.”
This story was originally published May 11, 2020 at 2:17 PM with the headline "Cellphone sensor could test for COVID-19 in people and on surfaces, researchers say."
