Studies have shown that a cheap, portable blood detector is accurate in detecting love, syphilis, and other infectious diseases, and is comparable to expensive hospital testing equipment.

Researchers used prototypes of "chip labs," the size of credit cards, to detect hundreds of patients in Rwanda and found that their accuracy was close to 100%.

They said that this type of blood detector, called "mChip," can solve the three major obstacles for people in poor areas to obtain medical services, that is, it is difficult to obtain inspections, high costs, and it takes a long time to know the test results.

Samuel Sia, a Columbia University professor who led the development of mChip, said: “Our idea is to let all people in the world have access to various tests regardless of their condition, instead of forcing them to go to the clinic for blood tests. It takes a few days to know the result.”

The results of the study are published in the latest issue of Nature. The mChip's production cost is estimated at one US dollar per unit (approximately S$1.2), so testing costs will be cheaper than current laboratory tests.