The ring is expected to become available in early 2016

Aug 23, 2015 13:54 GMT  ·  By

Specialists led by mechanical engineering expert Ernesto Rodríguez Leal of Monterrey, Mexico, are working on developing a high-tech ring that would diagnose STDs like syphilis, chlamydia, gonorrhea and trichomoniasis in under a minute. 

The team has already built a prototype, albeit one able to detect only markers of syphilis in a patient's blood. They are now improving the design to account for other STDs and hope to make the ring available sometime in early 2016.

How would one such ring work?

The portable medical device, the brainchild of Ernesto Rodríguez Leal, is designed to be placed on a patient's thumb. Once activated, a retractable needle comes out and collects a blood sample.

The blood is then directed to what the mechanical engineer and his colleagues call a lab-on-a-chip, essentially a network of four channels. Each of these channels contains a chemical cocktail designed to interact with the antibodies produced by a specific STD and trap them.

Based on the antibodies the lab-on-a-chip detects in a patient's blood, the ring provides a diagnosis, sending the data to a smartphone or tablet to be processed and interpreted by an app.

As noted, the scientists say the entire process takes less than a minute. Since the ring also produces electrical pulses resulting in numbness when collecting blood, the patient feels no pain.

The ring would allow early diagnosis

Specialist Ernesto Rodríguez Leal and his team imagine the ring being used not by doctors but by patients themselves, in the comfort of their own home.

“Every year more than 500 million people around the world contract one of these four STDs, 50 percent of them have between 15 and 23 years of age.”

“The problem is that 75 percent of them do not present early symptoms, therefore the need for an early detection strategy,” Ernesto Rodríguez Leal explained the need for this device, as cited by Science Daily.

Once on the market, the high-tech ring, dubbed Hoope, will sell for $50 (about €44). The team hope to figure out a way to upgrade it so that it would also detect pregnancy, cancer, diabetes and allergies.