By viral, we aren’t talking about a meme circulating the globe. We’re talking about the real pandemic virus: COVID.
And yes, there’s even an app for this particular viral phenomenon, thanks to a team of scientists at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) along with physicians at Santa Barbara Cottage Hospital.
The team has developed a smartphone application and laboratory kit that can diagnose COVID-19, COVID variants, and flu virus infections.
The smaRT-LAMP kit costs less than $100 to build, and only requires a saliva sample from the patient. The app uses a smartphone’s camera to measure a chemical reaction in the saliva and determines a diagnosis in 25 minutes — at a fraction of the cost of current diagnostic methods. The app and methodology are free and openly available to everyone.
The project was led by professors Michael Mahan David Low, and Charles Samuel of UC Santa Barbara, along with Santa Barbara Cottage Hospital physicians Jeffrey Fried, M.D. and Lynn Fitzgibbons, M.D. Additional collaborators include UCSB scientists Douglas Heithoff, Lucien Barnes, Scott Mahan, and Gary Fox, and Santa BarbaraCottage Hospital physicians Katherine Arn, M.D., Andrew Bishop, M.D., and Sarah Ettinger, M.D.
The smartphone study was published in the journal JAMA Network Open.