Development of Automated Detection and Wireless Reporting for a Handheld Point-of-Care Test

Second-generation rapid diagnostic tests, e.g. Lab-on-a-Chip (LoC) molecular diagnostics can help decentralize medical diagnostics for infectious diseases and provide far wider coverage than existing methods. Furthermore, they can provide results far more quickly, enabling early diagnosis and prevention of epidemics. However, to ensure a short turnaround time in testing, a compact, ideally low-cost, automated readout method is required. Preferably, the readout should also have integrated means of communication for automatic report of the results. We demonstrate a readout solution based on an ESP12F microcontroller board to read results from a LoC device demonstrated in our previous works. The readout solution relies on an LED-photodiode setup to read the results of immunochromatographic test strips. We evaluated the device by comparing readouts of positive and negative strips. During the evaluation, the device prototype was run from batteries and transmitted results via Wi-Fi to a PC, where a MATLAB application processed, displayed and saved results.