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. A $20 kit with seven markers capable of doing 2,800 screening tests in total would lead to an average price of just two-thirds of a cent per test. That represents a huge drop in price from the usual 20 cents per dipstick test.
The team of engineers at Johns Hopkins is currently focusing on screening tests for gestational diabetes, urinary tract infections, malnutrition or starvation, iron deficiency and infant jaundice. One test for high blood pressure is already going through field tests in Nepal. The team is working with Jhpiego to get more of the tests up and running soon (see our post on the proteinuria test for detection of pre-eclampsia for one iteration of the dipstick pen). The goal is to have the reusable dipstick highlighter pen deployed by 2012. See a full piece on the pen in Innovation News Daily here.