A smartphone attachment for self-analysis of urine for albumin
Personal kidney diagnostics in your smartphone
ChemPort.Ru based on Chemistry World: Personal kidney disease monitoring on your phoneResearchers from the USA have developed a small attachment for a smartphone and an application for it, the joint use of which will allow people to monitor the condition of their kidneys at home.
An easy and inexpensive addition to a smartphone is a device for fluorescence analysis that can work with a smartphone camera, allowing you to get a result in a few minutes.
Chronic kidney failure annually claims millions of lives around the world, only in the United States, the health of about 11% of the population is complicated by the condition of their kidneys. The usual monitoring of kidney health is to determine the content of albumin in the urine – a high content of this protein signals certain problems. Usually these tests are carried out in stationary laboratories with the help of special urine analyzers, which forces people who want to monitor their condition to regularly visit a hospital or clinic.
Such regular visits to the hospital laboratory will soon be avoided thanks to the Albumin Tester device, a digital fluorescent spectrometer that, thanks to an Android application, can work with a smartphone. The new system was developed in the group of Aydogan Ozcan from the University of California (Los Angeles). The weight of the device is only 148 g, which is comparable to the weight of an average smartphone, the albumin tester can be mounted on the back of the smartphone.
The device works as follows – urine is collected in a disposable test tube, after which the intensity of fluorescent radiation is analyzed using a smartphone camera, which is equipped with an additional plastic lens that is part of the albumin analyzer. The application processes fluorescent signals, and based on their intensity, the albumin concentration is determined somewhere within a second. The threshold for determining albumin using the developed device is 5-10 micrograms / ml, which is three times more sensitive than the permissible albumin content in urine.
The user-friendly application allows you to determine the concentration of albumin in the analyte in one second, as well as plot the weekly or monthly dynamics of albumin content in urine.
Ozkan suggests that the device developed in his group may be useful for early diagnosis of kidney diseases or for continuous monitoring of people belonging to high–risk groups - suffering from diabetes, hypertension and/or cardiovascular diseases. Govind Kaigala, a developer of microsystems for biomolecular analysis from IBM, agrees with Ozkan and says that the albumin tester is a gadget with a great future that can provide simple, fast and cheap regular determination of protein in urine. Ozkan suggests that the next step in working on everyday medical applications for consumer electronics will be the development of devices and applications for smartphones that will allow the identification of other biomarkers of kidney diseases, such as creatinine.
Article by Coskun et al. Albumin testing in urine using a smart-phone is published in the journal Lab on a Chip.
Portal "Eternal youth" http://vechnayamolodost.ru02.09.2013