Group N32: COVID-19 Pipette Challenge

The recent outbreak of coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) has highlighted the need for technology to support rapid, high-throughput testing of biological samples. The University of California, San Diego (UCSD) has implemented “Return to Learn,” a program with the goal of having students return to in-person learning as safely as possible. The program focuses on risk mitigation, viral detection, and intervention in order to combat the spread of the virus.  To accurately detect cases, the EXCITE lab at UCSD has been running roughly 4,000 tests a day. One stage of the testing process is manually orienting test tubes to be scanned in the Hamilton machine, which organizes each tube's information. The process of placing the tubes takes one minute per rack of 32 tubes and aligning the tubes takes another minute. With 120 racks used a day, this amounts to about two hours spent manually aligning tubes. To eliminate this laborious step entirely, the Anti-Rotation Feature (A.R.F)  was designed, forcing correct orientation of the test tubes when placing them into the rack.