IoT PCR for Pandemic Disease Detection and Its Spread Monitoring

Abstract

During infectious diseases outbreaks, the centers for disease control need to monitor particular areas. Considerable effort has been invested into the development of portable, user-friendly and cost-effective systems for point-of-care (POC) diagnostics. Connecting these systems via a mobile network would create an 'internet of things' (IoT) for healthcare, an essential tool helping to tackle infectious disease outbreaks. However, at present IoT based on a functional POC instrument is not available. Here we show fast, user-friendly, and affordable IoT system based on a miniaturized polymerase chain reaction device. We demonstrated the system's capability to detect and monitor the spread of infectious diseases, here using mosquito born dengue fever virus (DENV). We demonstrated the system's capability by amplification of either complementary deoxyribonucleic acid or ribonucleic acid of the DENV. The result data were then automatically uploaded via a Bluetooth interface to an Android-based smartphone and further wirelessly sent to global network, instantly making the test results available anywhere in the world. The IoT system presented here could become an essential tool for healthcare centers to help tackle infectious disease outbreaks identified either by DNA or RNA. Its use can be of side scope, since it can be modified to be compatible with other sensing methods. Funding Statement: Hanliang Zhu, Pavel Podesva, Xiaocheng Liu, Haoqing Zhang, Ying Xu, Honglong Chang, and Pavel Neuzil would like to acknowledge financial support from the Foreign Expert Plan #W0990109 and the help of technicians from the cleanroom at Northwestern Polytechnical University, Xi’an, P.R. China for the fabrication of chips used for this work. Declaration of Interests: Authors declare no competing interests.