Want to Know Your Sperm Count? Your Smartphone Can Now Accurately Do That For You
There are two conventional ways that a guy could check his sperm count: one is through consulting a doctor and give samples of his sperm for the needed tests, and two is by getting a male fertility test to be administered personally at home. But these two can be further simplified, and that is with a smartphone app and a device requiring no special training at all.
Developed by researchers at Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women’s Hospital, the system measures sperm count the cheapest – at about $50 – and easiest way possible, just like how women take pregnancy tests at home.
“We wanted to come up with a solution to make male infertility testing as simple and affordable as home pregnancy tests,” said Hadi Shafiee, the research team leader from Harvard Medical School.
Source: Harvard Medical School
The system involves a smartphone app paired with a special device that is a phone case created from parts taken from DVD and CD drives. This is where the sperm is inserted – via a special tube and disposable microchip – which contains multiple lenses that magnify the samples with the help of LED light.
Using the smartphone’s camera to record one-second videos of the semen, the guy can take a close-up look at the sperm sample through the screen. The accompanying app will do its job of analyzing the sperm and determine the properties of the sample with ‘extremely high accuracy’, the researchers said.
“We have demonstrated that the smartphone-based semen analyzer can accurately measure sperm concentration, motility, total sperm count, total motile sperm count, and linear and curvilinear velocities using a small volume (<35 μl) of an unwashed, unprocessed semen sample loaded into a disposable microchip,” they wrote in the journal Science Translational Medicine.
John Petrozza, a co-author, said that their brainchild is a “true game-changer”. He said, “Men have to provide semen samples in these rooms at a hospital, a situation in which they often experience stress, embarrassment, pessimism and disappointment.
Petrozza went on to say, “This test is low-cost, quantitative, highly accurate and can analyse a video of an undiluted, unwashed semen sample in less than five seconds.”
Sources: Telegraph UK | Fortune
