Fiber optics and smartphones team up to tell you if you are pregnant

Research from Hanover Centre for Optical Technologies in Germany developed a device that can perform biomolecular examination just with some fiber optic and your smartphone, the authors Kort Bremer and Bernhard Roth explained that one day you could tell if you are pregnant using your phone and an app.

This would be possible thanks to a method call “surface plasmon resonance” (SPR), GE healthcare life sciences explained that “the process occurs when when polarized light strikes an electrically conducting surface at the interface between two media. This generates electron charge density waves called plasmons, reducing the intensity of reflected light at a specific angle known as the resonance angle.”

SPR is already being use in labs, but normally requires lot of equipement since you need a light detector and a light source, but smartphones has these two elements so with a slight modification of some fiber optics this test can be use in a “ lab-on-a-chip devices for smartphones” as the authors called it.

Science Daily said that “Bremer carefully excised the polymer coating from a 10-millimeter segment of the optics cable to expose the bare 400-micrometer diameter glass fiber core. He then cleaned the segment, subjected it to a silver-coating process, added a small well in which to pour the solutions being observed, and polished both ends of the fiber to 45° angled faces. They were then adhered to the phone's case and, thus, to its LED and camera, the latter of which was affixed with a diffraction grating to separate the light beam into an emission spectrum.”

This device could not only tell you if you are pregnant but also detect diabetes, and use your GPS to get a route to the nearest hospital, drugstore or give your location to an ambulance.

Source: Medical Daily