I-Corps: A Smartphone-Based Pathogen Detection Device for Remote and Low-Resource Settings

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The broader impact/commercial potential of this I-Corps project is to enable a consumer device for the detection of infectious pathogens at the point-of-need instead of in a central laboratory environment. The project will enhance current approaches to disease detection and monitoring in remote and low-resource settings by rapid and sensitive detection of infectious agents and automated data-logging. The commercial impact of the detection system leverages current smartphone capability in concert with advances in imaging, microfluidics, and enhanced computation to deliver detection of multiple important human pathogens all within a portable format. Further, widespread user experience with smartphone technologies mitigates the need for additional training steps and lowers barriers to adoption. This project will support extensive customer discovery with field workers, healthcare community workers, clinicians, nurses, and procurement officials within governmental and aid organizations. This I-Corps project integrates the smartphone with external hardware and disposable microfluidic chips to enable a portable pathogen detection platform. The intellectual merit of the project stems from the implementation of newly developed particle diffusometry technology, an optical-based method that quantifies the Brownian motion of particles within a fluid. Combining particle diffusometry with nucleic acid-based DNA amplification methods that are standard for point-of-care device industry allows for order of magnitude increases in the sensitivity of pathogen detection. In the presence of pathogens, DNA amplification occurs and causes a decrease in the motion of particles in the sample solution that is imaged by the smartphone camera/external hardware microscope lens system. A smartphone application performs all of the quantitative computation, providing both detection results and immediately logging the data. Data can be readily pushed to the cloud where organizations can track detection events in real-time. Therefore, this I-Corps project will explore the market potential for smartphone-based pathogen detection in remote and low-resource settings and for applications where disease surveillance and monitoring is of great utility. To this end, this project will provide fast and affordable infectious pathogen detection solutions while aiding in effective healthcare resource distribution.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.