A team of biomedical engineering graduate students at Johns Hopkins is designing a reusable dipstick highlighter pen to reduce the cost of dipstick tests and spread the benefits of urine-based diagnostics to low-resource areas. Dipstick tests change color in response to urine and can diagnose conditions that threaten the lives of expectant mothers and neonates, such as gestational diabetes. However, the expense of dipstick tests serve as a roadblock to binging lifesaving diagnoses to women in the developing world. The reusable dipstick highlighter pen addresses this cost issue. The pen allows health care workers to simply mark pieces of paper with chemical reagents inside the pen, instruct women to urinate on the paper, and diagnose conditions based on color change of the paper.





