Urinalysis Screening for Rural Communities

Access to medical care and health screenings is a necessity for patients around the globe, but it can be difficult to provide this without screenings becoming costly or convoluted for people in low income communities. In rural and underdeveloped areas, patients are often disadvantaged when it comes to finding reliable and affordable healthcare. The isolation provided by their location and the rising costs of physicians makes it difficult for most impoverished communities to attain personalized care. Because of this, treatable diseases, such as chronic kidney disease, often go unaddressed, allowing diseases to progress to a critical condition. Mortality rates have shown to be higher in communities located in rural areas and among destitute economies. Telemedicine is one solution to improve rural health care by allowing patients to have remote access to health services. Due to the preventable nature of these diseases as well as their easily detectable biomarkers, we have created a device to diagnose and record patients' health using commercially available and our own developed strips with a sample of urine. Our goal for this project is to provide simple and fast diagnosis to detect albumin, urobilinogen, nitrite, as well as pH and glucose levels in urine combined with telemedicine to provide reliable results.