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Although male infertility is as common as female infertility, it often goes undiagnosed because of socioeconomic factors such as stigma, high cost of testing, and availability of laboratory facilities. To facilitate the necessary testing, Kanakasabapathy et al . have designed a smartphone-based assay that can be performed at home or in a remote clinic without access to laboratory equipment. The assay uses an inexpensive device that attaches directly to a phone and is operated through a smartphone application. The accuracy of this approach was very similar to that of computer-assisted laboratory analysis, even when it was performed by untrained users with no clinical background, demonstrating its potential for use at home and in low-resource settings.

The Odoreader device is a gas chromatography (GC) sensor that works like an “electronic nose” by identifying different patterns of compounds tied to urological cancers in patients’ urine. Urine samples are inserted into the device, whereby an algorithm then runs and can detect the cancer.