Researchers in Pittsburgh design pocket-sized lab that could transform diagnostic care
PITTSBURGH (KDKA) — Researchers in Pittsburgh are proposing a diagnostic tool that could change the game for health professionals and patients.
The hope is that the small but mighty device dreamed up by researchers at the University of Pittsburgh and UPMC could someday detect diseases more efficiently.
Pitt engineering assistant professor Amir Alavi said the portable pocket-sized lab doesn't even need batteries. It only needs a drop of blood to generate electricity and measure its conductivity.
"You inject the drop of blood into the chamber of the device and then what happens is there are multiple layers in this device. And when you squeeze the device, you are forcing that contact, and it creates a signal, electrical signal, a voltage. That signal basically represents the property of our blood," he said.
To put it simply, think of when you rub a balloon on your head and it quickly makes your hair stand. Well, their proposed self-powered tool could quickly pinpoint a disorder.
"We work on a kind of self-power sensors that are actually using a very specific mechanism to generate electricity. We call them triboelectric nanogenerators," Alavi said.
The diagnosis for metabolic diseases, for example, can be time-consuming and invasive, and even unfeasible in communities where health care resources are limited.
"Think of a patient or a surgeon in a remote area. There is no blood conductivity measurement device. There is no device basically to that and these devices are usually expensive," said Alavi.
Alavi describes their lab-on-a-chip device as very affordable. It's just 3D printed. Their research was recently published in the journal Advanced Materials.
The team of researchers has only scratched the surface with this, but their recent study explains how the device is capable of measuring blood at low frequencies. They need funding to conduct a larger study and collect data for people with specific diseases.
Alavi is ecstatic over the waves that the tiny device could make, including making his dream idea come to life, which might sound like it's straight out of a sci-fi film. He wants to someday design a chip that could be implanted in the body, enabling self-powered diagnostics.
"So you can use your blood basically to charge, to drain electricity in vivo at the same time you can use that device to monitor some of the physiological parameters," he said.