NIH grants $2.3M to development of FeverPhone, a portable disease diagnosis kit

Friday, June 24, 2016

Quick diagnosis of bloodborne diseases can very much be a matter of life and death, but bouncing results off a hospital can take hours or days — so the National Institutes of Health and Cornell University are working on a device called the FeverPhone that could cut that time to as little as 15 minutes.

“Imagine a glucose tester for your smartphone, where you can test for dengue instead of measure glucose,” said Cornell engineering professor David Erickson in a university news release.

Easy to deploy, quick to diagnose, and operable without expertise, the FeverPhone app would work with the breadbox-sized “Tidbit,” a largely automated machine that would take blood samples in and send the data to the phone for analysis. Erickson is working with Saurabh Mehta, a Cornell professor of global health, to develop the device. It attracted the attention of the NIH’s Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering, which wrote the team a grant for $2.3 million over four years.

Source: TechCrunch (link opens in a new window)

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