No bleeding required: Detect anaemia via smartphone
ATLANTA, Georgia: Biomedical engineers have developed a smartphone app to detect anaemia.
Instead of a blood test, the app uses photos of someone’s fingernails taken on a smartphone to determine whether the level of haemoglobin in their blood seems low.
“All other ‘point-of-care’ anaemia detection tools require external equipment, and represent trade-offs between invasiveness, cost, and accuracy,” said principal investigator Wilbur Lam. “This is a stand-alone app that can look at haemoglobin levels without the need to draw blood.”
The app should be used for screening, not clinical diagnosis.
Lam is a clinical haematologist bio engineer at the Aflac Cancer and Blood Disorders Centre of Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta, associate professor of paediatrics at Emory University School of Medicine and a faculty member in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech.
The study’s first author was Rob Mannino, who was motivated to conduct the research by his own experience living with betathalassemia, an inherited blood disorder caused by a mutation in the beta-globin gene. Mannino was a graduate research assistant in biomedical engineering who has since graduated.
“Treatment for my disease requires monthly blood transfusions,” Mannino said. “My doctors would test my haemoglobin levels more if they could, but it’s a hassle for me to get to the hospital in between transfusions to receive this blood test. Instead, my doctors currently have to just estimate when I’m going to need a transfusion, based on my haemoglobin level trends.” “This whole project couldn’t have been done by anyone but Rob,” Lam said. “He took pictures of himself before and after transfusions as his haemoglobin levels were changing, which enabled him to constantly refine and tweak his technology on himself in a very efficient manner. So essentially, he was his own perfect initial test subject with each iteration of the app.”
This is a stand-alone app that can look at haemoglobin levels without the need to draw blood. — Wilbur Lam, main researcher