Portable Analyzer Brings Blood Testing to Rural Areas
Blood tests are vital for detecting and monitoring disease, but they are most often done near more populated areas, where the samples can be analyzed in a laboratory. Seeing the need for a more transportable system that can analyze blood samples in rural and remote areas, two researchers in India have developed a new design that is simple, affordable, and easily deployed anywhere where a source of electricity is available.
Sangeeta Palekar is a researcher at Shri Ramdeobaba College of Engineering and Management (RCOEM) who helped devise the new design. She and her colleague, Jayu Kalambe, understand how powerful a simple blood test can be. "Routine blood tests can help track and eliminate the threat of many potential diseases," explains Palekar, noting that blood tests make up roughly one-third of all pathology laboratory tests.
Many existing devices in the laboratory use light to analyze blood sample. As light passes through a substance, its intensity changes depending on the concentration of the substance it is passing through. In this way, levels of red bloods cells or glucose, for example, can be quantified. The new analyzer by Palekar and Kalambe takes a similar approach. It involves an automated fluid dispenser that adds a controlled amount of reagent into the blood sample. Light is then passed through the sample, and a Raspberry Pi computer analyzes the data. The system can be adapted to analyze any biochemical substances in the blood by simply modifying the reagent and spectral wavelength that's used.
The researchers began by using commercially available reagent kit for analyzing glucose levels. They tested this reagent in their new design, and describe the results in a study published August 27 in IEEE Sensors Journal. When comparing the data obtained by their biochemical analyzer to the known results obtain by standard laboratory equipment, they found the data matched almost perfectly. What's more, the device could yield accurate results in just half a minute.
This prototype offers a cheap way to analyze blood samples remotely. Shri Ramdeobaba College of Engineering and Management
Palekar notes there are a lot of perks to this design. "The developed platform offers the advantages of automation, low cost, portability, simple instrumentation, flexibility, and an easily accessible interface," she says. "Overall, the proposed framework is an attractive solution to be incorporated in the low resource area as a universal platform for all biochemistry analysis simply by varying the wavelength of light and reagent."
As a next step, the women are interested in expanding upon the different types of blood analyses that can be done, for example to analyze proteins, cholesterol, triglyceride, albumin, and other common substances in the blood that are medically important. Palekar notes that the hardware could be further simplified with the right software solutions. As well, she envisions incorporating an IoT platform into the design, which could be helpful for remote monitoring.