Conclusions

Our device made a lot of progress this year, but there is still much work to do in order to get it to a place to be reliably used in the medical field. As far as overall design, the device matches the critical components that were necessary for sickle cell detection. The device was cheap, costing around $50 for an initial purchase, and only $6 for each disposable electrode. It was miniature, being only a few inches in length. Compared to current quantification techniques which take several days, our device was able to produce results within 30 minutes. However, the accuracy of the device has yet to be concluded, as the redox potential results sometimes varied between runs. We would also like to improve user accessibility and maintain safety standards by providing a casing that would limit a user’s time handling contaminated blood.

There were several limitations to our work, such as time and money constraints. Although the device was able to run in 30 minutes, the amount of runs able to be tested was limited due to the number of disposable electrodes purchased within the grant amount, the accessibility of sickled and wild-type blood samples, and the availability of the authors to run the code and process the sample data. Much of the time for this project was spent getting readable data from the device, and later testing involved testing real blood samples. Due to these reasons, there is much testing left to determine how accurate the device really is for sickle cell quantification based on changes in erythrocyte shape, proteins, etc. However, the device shows the potential to be used for other applications such as various diseases or viruses that affect hemoglobin.