There's Now A COVID Test That Uses A Smartphone And Costs Just $7
In new medical research, health experts demonstrated a system that relies on a smartphone’s camera to perform a COVID test, delivering 100 percent accurate results in trials and promising to bring the cost of at-home testing down to just $7 per test. Lately, the focus on smartphones as a tool for detecting medical conditions has increased, with some promising innovations already in the market.
Last year, Google announced that the camera on its Pixel smartphones can measure respiratory and heart rate. The company also created an AI-powered dermatology assist tool that can help identify 288 skin conditions by just clicking a picture with the phone’s camera. With the COVID-19 pandemic showing no signs of abating anytime soon, scientists have been hard at work creating faster and more economical methods to perform testing.
Related: How To Store COVID-19 Vaccination Details Into An iPhone's Apple Wallet
A study by scientists from the University of California, Santa Barbara, detailed a COVID testing method that employs a basic medical kit and a phone’s camera to detect the presence of the coronavirus pathogen. Published on the peer-reviewed JAMA Network Open, the paper says that the smartphone-driven testing system offered the same accuracy as the regular real-time reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (rRT-PCR) test for detecting COVID infection using saliva samples. The test follows what the team calls smaRT-LAMP protocols. To recall, the US government began delivering free at-home COVID tests late last month, but experts say they are not as accurate as RT-PCR tests performed in labs.
The new testing method proposed in the study uses a dish to hold saliva samples, LED lights, a hot plate, and a cocktail of
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