Faster and more accurate detection of infection can now be made with a low-cost, portable laboratory on a smartphone.
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‘A portable device on a smartphone could lead to faster, accurate and lower-cost results to detect infections, which will be very useful in rural areas.’
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"This smartphone reader has the potential to improve access and speed up healthcare delivery," said lead author Lei Li, Assistant Professor at the Washington State University. 
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"If we find out about infections, we can treat them more quickly, which makes a difference especially in low-resource, remote areas," Li added, in the paper published in the journal Clinica Chimica Acta.
The researchers tested the device, which is about the size of a hand, with 771 patient samples at Hospital of University of Pennsylvania and found that it provided false positives only about one per cent of the time.
The smartphone reader, which includes a portable device, takes a photo of 96 sample wells at once and uses a computer program to carefully analyse colour to determine positive or negative results.
Buying the components themselves, the research team was able to build the device for about $50, but the manufacturing cost would probably be lower than that, Li said.
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