Leaving your house to take some lab tests could be a thing of the past! A new health-tracking device uses a swab of saliva, nasal fluid, or blood, to provide simple, at-home medical diagnosis.
The device, priced at USD 199, can help determine if you are sick, check vitamin or testosterone levels, and help women figure out if it is a good time to try for a baby.
The company Cue, which hopes to ship the device early next year, is the brainchild of Ayub Khattak - who has a background in mathematics and biochemistry, and Clint Sever, a product designer and engineer.
Five years ago, Khattak was working on a project about genetic barcoding in plants at University of California, Los Angeles, and thought that the same idea could be applied to a miniaturised tester for viruses in humans.
The pair decided to take apart a home glucose tester and figure out whether that same basic hardware could extend to other types of tests, 'The Verge' reported.
That led to the small base-unit reader, which can analyse disposable cartridges that test different bodily fluids.
Users put a fluid into a cartridge, plug it in, and the Cue base unit delivers test results wirelessly over Bluetooth to an app on their phone.
The flu is one of five things Cue plans to assess in its initial model, alongside fertility, testosterone, inflammation, and vitamin D levels.
The flu test would be three times faster than a conventional one, and the Vitamin D test would take only 10 minutes to give results.
