Having blood tests is a torture for many, but the anguish for this medical procedure may have come to an end, since a startup, created by students of the University of Wisconsin, has hit the spot when developing a gadget capable of extracting the organic body fluid, without the need to prick the veins with needles or syringes.
He Hemolinkby Tasso Inc. is a device, about the size of a ping-pong ball (table tennis), that allows the patient to collect samples of his blood by himself and then take them to the laboratory. It is only enough to place it for two minutes on a space of the skin, at which time a small void is created with which the fluid from the microscopic or capillary channels is absorbed. Then the blood is taken to a small collector inside the equipment.
The technology, used in Hemolink, works with the forces that dominate the blood flow in a small portion of the torrent. The vice president of the startup, Ben Casavant, has pointed out that the tension created by the device is imposed by overcoming gravity and keeps the blood in the canal, regardless of the position in which the patient holds the device.
The amount of flow extracted is 0.15cm3, more than enough to perform routine analyzes and even to determine cholesterol levels, infections, cancer cells and sugar. And, most important of all, those who have tried it say that it is practically painless.
The project is being supported, nothing more and nothing less than, by DARPA (Agency for Advanced Defense Research Projects of the U.S.), an institution that has awarded Tasso Inc. with $ 3,000,000, so that the small and innovative device Hemolink Start being commercialized. The idea of this amount is also to obtain the cooperation of manufacturers of blood preservatives, so that the samples taken by the patient are perfectly usable by the laboratory to perform the tests.
It is expected that by 2016, the Hemolink It is available in the consumer market.
I like this:
Loading…
