Our Design

In remote and low income locations available means for detection of sickle cell disease are limited – it is crucial that a new device is rapid (less than 30 minutes per test), inexpensive, requires minimal training, and can determine the presence of HbS in a drop of blood.

Our design uses a miniature potentiostat to run voltage sweeps to induce a redox reaction on the blood sample. This redox reaction will be indicative of the type of hemoglobin present in the blood. 

The device is able to be run in under 30 minutes – the runs take about 13.4 minutes each, and requires one run for cleaning and one run for the redox potentials of the blood samples. The device is under $30 and each disposable PCB is about $6 for individual runs. The user does not need to have much training to run the device, as it only requires the blood to be prepared (using centrifugation and lysing), and then to run the code. Using the redox potentials from the cyclic voltammetry runs, we can determine the presence of the HbS in the sample. 

For our prototype design, we are testing our model built using the following components:

• KickStat: miniature potentiostat

• Disposable electrode (gold working, Ag/AgCl reference)

• 7 pin connector (slot insert)

• Jumper cables

• Micro USB to USB cable

As the potentiostat was designed from scratch, the integrated microcontroller had to be initialized with an Arduino derived bootloader to allow it to run user-defined code. This was a lengthy process that involved many steps including locating a compatible programmer and software to flash the needed bootloader onto the microcontroller &  temporarily modifying to device to receive the leads for the programmer. Once this was completed, the hardware development was deemed sufficiently effective to allow us to move onto iterating upon the Arduino codebase.

Page Leader: Felix Tajanko