New technology allows smartphone to detect HIV

Smartphones are extremely popular. They allow you to keep in touch with people, maintain a calendar, purchase apps, play games, and now, thanks to researchers at the University of Columbia, they can detect the presence of disease.

NBC Bay Area reports this new accessory allows anyone to detect syphilis and HIV using just a smartphone or tablet. This new device, which is called the “dongle”, works by taking a prick of blood. It then tests to see whether there are a higher-than-normal number of the antibodies that fight HIV and syphilis in the blood.

If such antibodies are high in number, it is a large indicator of either disease. The device attaches to the smartphone or tablet via the audio jack, and then gives a diagnosis in about fifteen minutes. This could be very important in giving developing countries access to disease testing. If more widespread, researchers hope the dongle would limit mother-to-child transmission of HIV among other factors. In addition, the dongle would allow health care workers to go door to door, which is easier than having people come to clinics.

The dongle, in addition to its accessibility, is only $34 dollars, and the cartridge needed for reset costing $2. The dongle could bring about a new age of HIV testing, but it is not quite ready for widespread testing yet. The firsts test of the device were conducted with 96 patients in Rwandan clinics and testing centers. Some of these tests found that the dongle still sometimes results in false positives. However, these bugs should be remedied with further testing.