Low-Cost Home Diagnostics: Smartphone Plus Nanoscale Porous Silicon

Electrical engineers at Vanderbilt University  are envisioning a simple home medical test consisting of various silicon chips coated in special film. One chip could detect drugs in the blood, another could detect proteins in the urine indicating infection, and another could detect bacteria in water. The Vanderbilt team imagines a user picking the bodily fluid to test, taking a picture with a smartphone, and an app would indicate if there’s a problem or not. They have developed the necessary material: nanoscale porous silicon. "With our nanoscale porous silicon, we’ve created these nanoscale holes that are a thousand times smaller than your hair. Those selectively capture molecules when pre-treated with the appropriate surface coating, darkening the silicon, which the app detects," says Vanderbilt electrical engineer Sharon Weiss.

Transcript

00:00:02 There's a lot of types of I would say disposable point of care testing. So anything from a pregnancy test to glucose monitoring. There is also now products that are emerging on the market using your phone. Most of the products that are disposable that you can buy in the stores now are single purpose. They're not a platform that you could apply to many things. We're developing a platform that you could apply to many types of applications and you already have your phone, so you have the expensive piece of hardware. You're just buying a disposable that could be used for many things. One would be, let's say you're out camping and you want to test whether the creek water is safe to drink. You've got your little tiny disposable nano structure porous silicon sensor.

00:00:45 You take a picture of it, you drop the water on. You take a picture of it and now you know whether or not it's safe to drink that source.