Graduate student proposes new blood test device

Graduate student Ali Farzbod has proposed the creation of a device that can help diabetic patients check and receive blood tests quicker.

Ali Farzbod worked with his brother Farhad Farzbod to research the device, called a Medichip.

The device would be used for monitoring a person’s health rather than curing a disease, Farhad Farzbod said. If a person can detect a disease before the symptoms show up, or right at the dawn of the symptoms, curing it could be much cheaper because of the early stage that it is in. Instead of going to a lab technician to get blood checked, the device will provide diabetic patients with the opportunity to do it from home.

Ali Farzbod’s idea is to insert a sensor on top of the device, which will cause a person to use a smaller sample of blood.

Working with a biomedical device has limits because it has to be passed through the Food and Drug Administration and the actual mechanism isn’t an algorithm, Ali Farzbod said.

Ali Farzbod said he got inspired with this device through a device he was focused on before, which was an environmental monitor that dealt with heavy metal in water. He realized that instead of doing that, he should make a device that takes a drop a blood and divides it into 50 smaller drops.

He realized that he needed to build his sensors in a way that would help the human body instead of the environment.

When measuring glucose, patients go every year for a check up, Ali Farzbod said. Prior to the check up, the patient can’t eat anything the night before. After they check your blood, technicians give you the results in two days.

“Imagine all of that become you give one single drop of blood, and in 20 minutes you will have the results on your phone,” Farzbod said. “So that’s the idea that my company is trying to bring.”

Core technology will be needed to bring that result, Ali Farzbod said.

“In recent years, there has been lots of studies that if you do this more often, it can predict heart diseases up to 10 years,” Ali Farzbod said.

Ali Farzbod said instead of checking a person’s blood once a year, it’s better to do it once a month so that an individual can know their body’s trend. Knowing what’s going on in a person’s blood ahead of time can help with knowing what to do.

For example, if a person needs to change their diet, they will be able to detect that, and also prevent other diseases from occurring.

Hyejin Moon, Medichip cofounder and mechanical and aerospace engineering associate professor, said the device will help patients get their results quicker.

“The device itself is completely automated. So, we don’t need any specialist to handle the lab test,” Moon said.

Moon said the device can be used in small doctor’s offices and in drug stores so that patients can run the test by themselves.

“From the economic point of view, it helps to reduce the health care costs and also, obviously from the humane point of view, it reduces the amount of, you know, death and suffering amongst patients,” Farhad Farzbod said.

Ali Farzbod said that this is just a proposal, the creation of the device can take up to five years to create and launch, but he’s in high hopes that it succeeds.