Diagnosing Diseases with Origami Microscopes | Engineering Is

Manu Prakash and his lab at Stanford University have designed an origami based paper microscope, called a Foldscope. The microscope is printed on waterproof paper. The user punches out the pieces and folds them together to create a fully functional microscope. It works with standard microscope slides and requires no external power to operate. You simply hold the Foldscope up to a light source (like the sun) and look through the salt grain-sized lens to view the sample on the slide. The high curvature of the tiny lenses used in the Foldscope allows small objects to be highly magnified. This little invention costs less than a dollar to produce and could have major implications for global health and for science education.

Transcript:

- [Voiceover] The world is a very big place. There are remote places around the world. There are places that are not remote but are fractured primarily because of socioeconomic reasons. You can have a city with millions of people and right on the edge of that city, you have something that has absolutely no healthcare. There are a lot of infectious diseases which are prevalent in tropical areas and developing countries. Scientific tools need to be available. A healthcare worker by themselves cannot do magic and tell you what disease you have. Microscopy is a core tool in healthcare. Many diseases are caused by microscopic organisms that you cannot see. If somebody had a microscope right there, they would prepare the sample. It could be urine, it could be stool, it could be saliva. Most likely, it's blood. And then they would look into the sample to find that disease or not. A majority of the world lives in conditions where it's not so easy to just have access to diagnostic tools. People don't actually get diagnosed at all because microscopy as an infrastructure does not exist in the world.

- And also, approximated, you can show that it's approximately equal--

- [Manu] We wanted to tackle that problem by asking this question of what is the right tool that enables diagnostics in the field? It should be simple enough that you can fix it. It needs to be robust, it need to be easy to use. It needs to really last. It needs to be cheap. We wrote down these constraints. We told our self we'll make something that costs a dollar. That was a tall order and we ended up doing that. So in the end we came up with a solution where people build this object. So a Foldscope is a origami-based paper microscope that you fold together by your own hands. You put it together in five to 10 minutes, and then you have a completely functional instrument. It costs less than a dollar and it allows you to look at sub-cellular things.

- This is the sheet that we provide in the Foldscope kit and it contains all of the components you need to make a Foldscope. When you assemble the Foldscope together you end up with something that looks like this and this accommodates a standard sized slide and it's inserted from the bottom like this. And in order to use the Foldscope you can pan the lens relative to the sample. So to view the sample you wanna hold it up towards a light source, unless you have a light source on the back, and just look through the lens with your eye. This is a human blood smear that I'm looking at now. So when we started the Foldscope project, we just started with the paper that we had available to us and simple tools like a utility knife, rulers, just Scotch tape, and we came up with a bunch of different configurations that we tested.

- So one of the things that we tried to do was build some very stripped-down versions that almost required no batteries, nothing. They would last forever. They use solar light to just illuminate, that's the first basic version. Then you add another one which has light modules to really improve the performance and also the fact that you can image in the dark. You're not relying on sunlight all the time. Then there are versions that are different magnification. But then there are versions that allow you to do different types of microscopy. There is another microscope that I'm very proud of, which is what we call projection microscopy. We actually project the image out as if magically throwing it on any surface. We use that to train healthcare workers because in a room everybody's seeing the exact same image. You just point at it. You say, "Look, this is a parasite and this not." What you should do is hold it like that with your hands, and then I think I-- We are doing clinical trials and validation. We are working on malaria and African sleeping sickness. That's another disease in which the patient does not have the time, if he gets the disease, to come to the hospital. You have to go village-to-village looking for everyone and anyone who has something.

Видео Diagnosing Diseases with Origami Microscopes | Engineering Is канала KQED QUEST