Arduino Robot Arm Lateral Flow Assay Expediter Prototype
This post documents the results of the experiment I conducted to see if an Arduino and Braccio Robot Arm could be used to perform a Lateral Flow Assay (LFA), or lateral flow test. I was specifically interested in how this robot could assist Rapid On-site Testing for Covid-19, using the Antibody or Antigen Lateral Flow Tests.
The results were very promising and I believe a robot arm performing Lateral Flow Assay tests would allow one person to perform 100+ LFA's an hour.
The basic idea is to have standardized plastic trays that can hold the required elements for the Test, including the LFA Cassette, vial, pipette, and swab. The user would load the tray and place it on the robot. The robot detects a new test and begins to preform the process specified by the type of test. It has an built-in timer so that the robot will wait the appropriate times to perform the necessary steps, and notify the user when the test is ready to be read.
The idea came from watching lateral flow tests process videos, but I am not a doctor or scientist. I had the idea, wanted to test it, and am sharing the results in the hopes that it might inspire someone more capable to bring industrial automation to rapid on-site COVID-19 testing, and ramp up to being able to process tens of thousands of test on-site.
Equipment
The equipment in the experiment included:
- Braccio Robot Arm and Board
- Arduino Uno Microcontroller
- Lateral Flow Cassettes (the videos show a mock cassette made from walnut)
- Medical Pipettes
- 2ml centrifuge vials
- Swabs
Results
You can see the results of my prototype in the follow two videos:
There seems to be some promise. Even with the Braccio, which is made from plastic, there is a lot of potential, as I could see a fully functional version made with the Braccio being field deployed.
Based my calculations one Braccio Robot Arm and Arduino could process about 100 tests an hour, and assuming maximum of 20 hours a day, you could do 2,000 tests a day per arm. An attendant would need to be working the robot continuously. If you had a room full of Robot arms, you could potentially do 100,000 or more tests a day.
Expediter
The lateral flow assay is defined by the US National Institues of Health as:
"Lateral flow assays (LFAs) are the technology behind low-cost, simple, rapid and portable detection devices popular in biomedicine, agriculture, food and environmental sciences."
How can a Robot Arm be used to speed up, or expedite, the repetitive actions of the lateral flow assays, so that a maximum number of tests could be performed by one technician per day.
I hope we can rapidly accelerate on-site testing as a means that countries like Slovakia have recently deployed. From the Globe and Mail: "The small central European country tested two-thirds of its 5.5 million people over two days, on Oct. 31 and Nov. 1, using rapid antigen kits, which are less accurate than PCR tests."
Robots can help speed-up processes and can have a role in the rapid roll out of mass testing, such as is encouraged by Nicole Rura of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health: "Testing half the population weekly with inexpensive, rapid-turnaround COVID-19 tests would drive the virus toward elimination within weeks—even if those tests are significantly less sensitive than gold-standard clinical tests."