*The two blue LEDs are actually UV and are used to measure the fluorescence of the agent if antigen markers are present. The red LEDs read the control lines to ensure the test has been done correctly. The fluorescence is a difficult measurement!* *This video is not about which COVID-19 home test kit you should purchase. This is an exploration and analysis of this particular device for educational purposes only. For all medical advice regarding COVID-19 please contact your doctor.*
Sorry, don't understand - does 2 lines mean positive? Or 2 lines can still mean negative if the 2nd line isn't "fluorescent"? I ask because I just used one of these while having symptoms. It said negative, but when I cracked it open there was definitely a 2nd line (faint, but not difficult to see).
Like everyone else, I am disgusted by this. A complete waste, all so more data about you can be gathered in 'the cloud'. Meanwhile, small businesses trying to make actual useful products haven't been able to get MCUs in a year or more. What a joke.
To rub salt into the wound, over 2 million! of these were found to be defective so the company had to recall them or render them useless during recall (check FDA web-site for details). 2 million of these chips went bye-bye.
@@stevec5000 only a PCR test run by a professional medical laboratory that participates in cross laboratory calibration even approaches "certified accuracy". That's pretty much true for all medical tests.
@@stevec5000 The main source for inaccurate tests is user error. So to have a "certified" tests it cant be carried out by someone at home but needs to happen by a professional under controlled conditions.
@@nvzn Generally medical waste is incinerated. Not exactly, environmentally sounds to do that with plastics. Medical waste by definition is, at-least here in the US, NEVER recycled in any context.
Absolutely no reason for this to be electronic beyond the data logging on the cloud. The point he makes at the end about using optical analysis on the phone by taking a photo is valid. Huge waste of resources.
There is a reason - whether or not it is a good one is another matter. You need to expose it to the fluid, wait a certain amount of time, then read it. If you read it early, you'll get a false negative, if you wait too long, the test strip will change colour regardless, giving a false positive. So you have people with manual tests complaining about 'feint lines' or 'I looked at it after an hour and the line turned blue - is that positive? Sealing it in a box and getting a computer to read it at the correct time *should* make it more accurate.
@@robertbackhaus8911 did you not hear him say the 2 electronic ones he purchased gave false positives. He also said they had to remove them because a large batch gave false positives
Oh, wow. Now we see how chip shortage actually happened!!! Sorry for those months of the fabbing process to make one of the nRF SoCs. It wouldn't be too hard to have a refill strip for that test device though.
@@navadeep025 excellent comment!!! I had just liked a comment right above yours discussing cross contamination but your comment makes sense. I suppose it depends on how fast blood glucose degrades and how fast a corona virus degrades to ensure past strips wouldn’t affect a new strip.
This product somehow beautifully summarizes the craziness of this year! It has it all, COVID, the cloud (no "AI" though 😟), chip shortage and privacy concerns. Amazing 😂
Then it needs to be stored in a blockchain somewhere to prove you haven't faked the results. And of course there needs to be some subscription element attached :)
So it connects to your phone and then your phone uploads the result, the physical location, your phone number, the contents of your all your contacts at a guess. This single use product is all about harvesting data. It is probably optimal for what it is designed to do.
@@itsevilbert Exactly. I installed the LinkedIn app and for years using the contacts that it stole from my phone it has been suggesting links to friends and former colleagues that have passed away. That was the last time I installed and apps on my phone. The phone is bad enough as it is without adding more cancer to the pot.
I'm already annoyed that normal COVID tests have plastic bins around the test paper, and a foldable cardboard tray for the test tube. But seeing this.... wow, if well engineered those parts including battery can serve a good purpose for at 10+ years. It makes my stomach turn around when it's single use. What also disappoints me that these devices didn't seem to have tamper protection. How hard would it be to add an optic blocker at the COVID result port, so that the test will always read negative as it will never read a positive test line? Jigged electronic tests sounds perfect for some I suppose.
For some reason I'm more upset about the idea of throwing out the 2032 lithium cell after 30 seconds of use then I am about the idea of throwing out the very carefully photo-lithographically etched plastic-packaged (and potentially rare- thanks chip shortage) pieces of silicon. The idea that the entire device is disposable just sits wrong- at least diabetic testing uses separate disposable strips and long-lived tester. EDIT: For those curious, it looks like Walmart would sell these for ~26$ each, battery is actually used for 15 minutes, and the advertised use is for domestic/international travel. So, the use case is more having an electronic record that a test was taken+when, rather then answering the question "Do I / my family have COVID". Which... that's a little more forgivable, but it does go back to "couldn't y'all make the strips replacable, and just pack 5 strips in a box/sell-refills?" Also, the marketing mentions that it's approved for a "single test", where as most other test strips require second test a few days after a negative. I'd be curious if the LED processing isn't tied to that- say seeing an effect that's difficult to witness outside controlled conditions.
If its approved for a single test that might explain the false positives TSP got. To get that approval they would likely have to have raised the sensitivity of the test quite a lot.
you're kidding, right? all those components, plastics, optics, and even a microcontroller to read 2 blue lines visible with the bare eye? what a massive unjustifiable waste
Really interesting video, thanks for sharing! I'm glad you addressed the E-waste aspect of this, it really is incredibly wasteful to throw away such a lot of perfectly good electronics after just a few minutes' use. I was disappointed at how much plastic was used in the Lateral Flow Test kits we have here in the UK, but this really takes the biscuit! It goes to show that environmental considerations are still far too low down on the list of considerations when we design things, and we all need to take a bit more responsibility when we are designing new products.
I’m not a fan of single use products. But it’s cool nonetheless…curious why they had to have that much electronics just to tell you that there’s 2 lines present.
This one gives the wrong result which obviously undermines the usefulness - but for pregnancy tests, electronic ones produce a very consistent interpretation if (e.g.) one of the two lines is very faint. It'll also keep track of time, if the test result becomes valid after 20 minutes then invalid again after 60 minutes.
@@michaeljtandy adding to the line of electronic pregnancy tests: the consisent interpretation helps with people who might be in panic, or have difficulty seeing or completely blind! Sadly those electronic pregnancy tests aren't always marketed for the features you mentioned and often are pusheb because they're lying about it "being more accurate" or pushed towards people who would be 100% fine with a regular test...
Just came to comment, like (good so) so many others, how disgusting I find doing that completely unnecessary BT thing. It is easier and better just without the BT. There is literally no advantage from it. Just making land fill garbage!
My only guess is that oh so precious consumer data being phoned home the first chance the thing gets. Edit: under the cover of it being a handy easy to read interface.
electronic pregnancy tests are the same. They are literally just a normal pregnancy test with a LED and photo detector to read the lines and then give you a digital output. Talk about complication for the sake of complication...
It would be interesting to trace out the PCB traces to find out the exact path. Not of the current, but the $$$! It is all about the $$$. Unfortunately there are millions of people who would rather trust their phone App than their own eyes, because if it is on their phone, it is "official" and must be true (and more reliable and accurate because: "Digital", "Bluetooth", "Technology", "Science"...). Who are these people? Well, you can always find a bunch of them in lines around a store when a new phone model is about to ship.
Didn't know electronic strip tests exist but I'm at least glad that the comment section is as repulsed as I am. ...no way I would install an app just to get result of a test, rather take it apart and check for myself.
This explains the Nordic N52810 chip shortage for a bit and why these may be the prioritized part and have already returned on stock... Such a bloody waste. Someone should be fired.
@@yaghiyahbrenner8902 Already designed with it and it is immensly powerfull, but the stupid tools can't even program the two cores in the right order to not fail.
Why would any manufacturer think this is a good idea? Why is it even economical to produce something like this? It can only be economical when it actually gets bought. But why does it get bought... how do they market this as being better than just a regular rapid antigen test? I am so confused. Something like this shouldn't be allowed to exist.
Excellent use of semiconductors during a global chip shortage, they'd otherwise just go into a phone (5-7 year lifespan), a PC (~10 year lifespan) or a car (20+ year lifespan) if they didn't go into this single-use waste of resources.
If these have been recalled, then there should be a ton of them that might be available cheap for reprogramming and turning into something useful. OK comment section -- instead of whining about the waste -- what would you turn these into?
there should be a law preventing this kind of waste... meaning, just look at the amount of plastic, pcb, leds and even an ic, plus a battery which shouldn't be thrown away with normal trash - and all of this for A SINGLE USE! all that talk about sustainability, recycling, carbon neutrality and then there are things like these... they could have perhaps made it so the test strip is removable and you could recharge it for another test, still huge waste of resources, I'm guessing someone used up a government grant to produce these, else it just makes no sense at all
Im 90% sure i have purchased that exact same clear plastic lens set before for use in a custom encoder one one hand, pointlessly IoT on the other hand, covid test with a free unobtainable NRF chip
False positives can be as bad as false negatives, not by spreading covid but by spreading fear and disruption. Over here in the UK we had what was called the pingdemic where people with the covid tracking app on their phones were getting pinged that they had been in contact with someone with covid and had to isolate for ten days, ended up with half the country self isolating at one point. I tried one of the bluetooth testing apps on my phone and at one point in a traffic jam had five unknown blue tooth signals showing on my phone.
Indeed, put a QR code on those basic ones and it will be as good as digital with some image recognition. Maybe scan twice - before and after use - to ensure the time of use.
Aside from the amount of eWaste for no good purpose, it’s astonishing to ponder what the BOM cost of those electronics are! Even in quantities of 7,000, the nRF52810 is almost $2 per chip on Digi-Key (in QFN packaging, not QFP). It’s ridiculous to design this much hardware for essentially no purpose, and I agree that there’s nothing this does better than a test strip with a QR code on it.
One day Acorn Computers Ltd created the ARM chip and put it into their awesome Archimedes computers that ran RISC OS only to find later the chip used in single use COVID tests with less use than the computer’s mouse 😩
Creative solutions, but not so environmental friendly, research on such stuff is also huge to make it reliable product, it is better to put money to make better vaccin.
Just out of curiosity, did you by any chance check if the bands are fluorescent? Often times antibodies are fluorescently labeled and it might make slightly more sense to detect a fluorescent signal in this kind of getup.
The apparent reason for the electronics is to provide reasonably secure documentation of a negative test result as required for some air travel or by some schools and businesses. Of course, this is arguably not necessary and quite wasteful for home testing in many cases. Also, perhaps the sensors are better at reading the strips than the human eye so that a single test is sufficient. (I'm ignoring whatever problem led to the recall.) The competing Abbott BinaxNOW test requires a second test between 36 and 72 hours after a first test if the first test is negative.
But how you can ensure that the results are based on The one person sample not another person? The producer should be fined for introducing waste to the enviroment and obliged to collect all used ones.
@@aktik6000 I don't like the waste, and I'm not defending the system, just offering some explanation. I don't know all the details, but the manufacturer offers an optional video observation service using a smartphone that provides evidence that the results are from the user's own sample.
I would guess the blue LED's are to stimulate emission from the wave of chemicals moving forward, as the blue light excites the test strip chemicals to fluoresce, so you have a pair of points, where you both detect that fluid of enough quantity has been placed, and that it is reacting as it travels down the capillary tube in the device. The time to travel from detection of first glow till second glow then can be used to calculate the wait time before doing the sense, as they have no real way to tell when the user has put sample in otherwise. No real amplification, just an antigen protein held in place, that reacts with a specific protein in the sample, and a separate set of antigens that react with something that will be in the sample in any case, like amylase, so that when the second reaction has shown a positive result, the first one is complete enough to tell if the test protein is there in enough volume. Very likely the test is looking for the antibody protein, so immunised people will show up as positive for the antigen, which is why the test is now unreliable, as it will trigger on those who have had, or who are currently infected, while only being able to reliably tell those who are not immunised apart. You could make a reusable machine, just swap out the optical detection to resistance or conductivity, using the same chemical paths that glucose monitors use, where you have a disposable test strip. Same detection methods as used there, where the original versions were human read optical tests, but all went to electronic. You might need the first generation or two to have a EEPROM to provide calibration constants for the particular batch, but the current technology has enough stability in manufacture that they simply laser trim the trips after manufacture to get the last tiny variation out, as the process has been refined and made repeatable.
Thanks for the video, I actually tried to use this test kit today, but when I connected it to my phone it told me it was expired. So I unpacked it and it was pretty simple. I swabbed my nose as instructed and dripped some extract onto the test strip and got a blue bar, I guess I'm not infected, right? I can understand why they made it like this and claim that the test results are more accurate, after all, people with visual impairments also need to be tested. However, how people with visual impairments can read their help videos and how to align the drip port is a problem they need to solve.
Things like this makes me wanna go double Thanos on humanity. The factory that agreed to manufacture these and the company that created these needs to be destroyed... for the sake of the earth.
@@nerddub The nRF52810 has a 64MHz ARM Cortex-M4 CPU, which is plenty fast... But 192 KB Flash + 24 KB RAM aren't enough. It also has no display and no keyboard/mouse. So the Answer is: No, it won't run DooM (and what is crysis?;)). But the nRF52810 has a lot of digital interfaces, SPI, TWI and a bunch of GPIO. So you could install a display and maybe some input devices, maybe a bit of flash and some external ram and then someone might get DooM running. There is STM32Doom, which runs on a STM32F429 (also ARM Cortex-M4) with 8MB external RAM and the /doom/doom1.wad file via USB-OTG ;)
This abomination of e-waste should not exist. I had a think about this for a while and I thought maybe it could be justified if: 1. it used IR LEDs for better detection, but it doesn’t. 2. you needed to provide a trustworthy test result that’s self-administered by a malicious person who would otherwise lie about their result, but you could do that with a smartphone app. 3. The company has a perverse obsession with collecting people’s data, but you could do that with a smartphone app. The only plausible justification I can think of is if: • you want to mislead the consumer into thinking your test is somehow more advanced and accurate than the competitor by putting it in a sleek plastic case with a clean smartphone app.
okay, i was just gonna say, that those BinaxNow tests look like a great design, for not being encased in plastic .. then i saw, that the bloody things cost 20 bucks pop.
It is total waste of effort and money for the buyer as electronics are absolutely unnecessary. It looks as if it uses some precision electronic measurement e.g. gluco meters, but really it is just reading the markers which anyways user can do unless user is visually challenged.
This is ridiculous. What a stupid pointless device. A home test kit does NOT need to have any electronics in it. It works the same way as the lateral flow home test in the UK.
I am wondering how to read the stripe. I used water to do a control test and i get two blue lines ……… so two blue lines are negative? This design is just a waste of time … money … resources
Should be illegal to produce this kind of single use electronics containing lithium batteries, what an absurd waste of resources and cause of e-waste just to get a message on your phone.
Before I watch this, it wouldn’t surprise me if it’s just a lateral flow test with a digital sensor similar to a digital pregnancy test, but at 10 times the price of the ‘free’ LFT ones here in 🇬🇧
Much like others in the comments section I thought "Hang on, that SoC is such a waste in that", but it turns out it is useful for no more than a cheap mouse or an expensive smart remote control, so for that I applaud them, otherwise, the device seems a terrible waste.
These things should be banned. Everybody is talking about CO2 waste and then I see this. What a waste. This should be reusable with exchangable strips or strip cassettes.
Like so many things... "How can we make this more expensive and have an excuse to justify it?" Insulin instantly comes to mind as another but the "philosophy" is everywhere.
Incredible waste of resources. I can go you one better, take a look at single use sleep study devices. This has sensors you attach to you finger i guess to measures blood oxygen levels and possibly heart rate. There is also a sensor that you tape to your chest and a 'watch' you wear on you wrist with Bluetooth connectivity. Instructions say to toss it all in the trash in the morning. Pretty disgusting. Im sure insurance and all of us are paying a pretty penny for this ewaste. I dont know how much this ellume device is but maybe it could be repurposed as a simple dev board seeing as it has lots if bed of nails test points?
I am constantly astounded by the pointless creation of electronic devices that are thrown away too soon....this is a shocking single use tragedy and if we carry on doing this we deserve to lose our place on the planet
I was thinking what exactly wrong with it... EVERYTHING is. Only actual reason for something like this to exist is make sure they know when you got positive result
I had ordered 12 free tests through USPS and got a box full of these tests. I can’t believe the amount of electronics put into a one-time use test that are just going to get thrown out, when all you really need is the test strip in the middle of the test device. It’s also needlessly more complicated than just reading lines that appear on a regular at-home test - like you need to download an app, connect the device, and it makes you wait the full 15 minutes when with the regular tests, you’ll usually see results within half that time, so if they think it’s a solution to make testing more easy/accessible then they are sadly mistaken. Such an idiotic, over-engineered test that produces so much e-waste.
Well, isn't that nice. The whole world is hampered by a component shortage and then you got a one-time-use item like this with perfectly fine parts land in the trash. Not that a device like this would be a good idea at any other time. Resource waste like this has to be taxed into oblivion.
how absolutely wasteful! Why isn't there an international body set up already to deem which products are worth producing and which are not? could curb so much e-waste
*The two blue LEDs are actually UV and are used to measure the fluorescence of the agent if antigen markers are present. The red LEDs read the control lines to ensure the test has been done correctly. The fluorescence is a difficult measurement!*
*This video is not about which COVID-19 home test kit you should purchase. This is an exploration and analysis of this particular device for educational purposes only. For all medical advice regarding COVID-19 please contact your doctor.*
Sorry, don't understand - does 2 lines mean positive? Or 2 lines can still mean negative if the 2nd line isn't "fluorescent"? I ask because I just used one of these while having symptoms. It said negative, but when I cracked it open there was definitely a 2nd line (faint, but not difficult to see).
@@gat0rch1khave you gotten an answer for this? Curious myself.
Like everyone else, I am disgusted by this. A complete waste, all so more data about you can be gathered in 'the cloud'. Meanwhile, small businesses trying to make actual useful products haven't been able to get MCUs in a year or more. What a joke.
I think the MCU used here is little bit overpowered for this kinda application anyway..
@@younesthabet It likely was the only one available due to the shortage. Bird in hand......
To rub salt into the wound, over 2 million! of these were found to be defective so the company had to recall them or render them useless during recall (check FDA web-site for details). 2 million of these chips went bye-bye.
@@tow.JanWinnicki Ooops!
Excellent video! I agree, this should not exist, extremely wasteful.
The seed of fear reaps very profitable crops.
Yep, why make it Bluetooth if its only going to be used once?!
gimmick
At least there isn‘t a rechargeable cell like on the „disposable“ power banks.
That seams like a lot of Ewaste for a test. They should make them with replaceable strips.
I think there may be a version of it with disposable strips, but probably more expensive.
They should first make one that is accurate but there are no tests with certified accuracy!
@@stevec5000 only a PCR test run by a professional medical laboratory that participates in cross laboratory calibration even approaches "certified accuracy". That's pretty much true for all medical tests.
@@stevec5000 The main source for inaccurate tests is user error. So to have a "certified" tests it cant be carried out by someone at home but needs to happen by a professional under controlled conditions.
Or...
you could just look at the strip...
While I do appreciate the cost saving engineering and the benefits of testing, making this an electronic single use device is absolute BS.
Its worse than that. Its not e waste its medical waste.
@@ligarsystm no, it's even worse than that. It's Medical E-waste.
yet people have no complaints getting PCR tests. so if you can't see the waste it doesn't exist right?
@@nvzn Generally medical waste is incinerated. Not exactly, environmentally sounds to do that with plastics. Medical waste by definition is, at-least here in the US, NEVER recycled in any context.
The world is coming to an end on account of scarcity of resources. We have nothing but despair, disappointment and death to look forward to
Absolutely no reason for this to be electronic beyond the data logging on the cloud. The point he makes at the end about using optical analysis on the phone by taking a photo is valid. Huge waste of resources.
There is a reason - whether or not it is a good one is another matter. You need to expose it to the fluid, wait a certain amount of time, then read it. If you read it early, you'll get a false negative, if you wait too long, the test strip will change colour regardless, giving a false positive. So you have people with manual tests complaining about 'feint lines' or 'I looked at it after an hour and the line turned blue - is that positive?
Sealing it in a box and getting a computer to read it at the correct time *should* make it more accurate.
@@robertbackhaus8911 in other words people are sooo stuupid
@@robertbackhaus8911 did you not hear him say the 2 electronic ones he purchased gave false positives. He also said they had to remove them because a large batch gave false positives
@@randombuilds5826 What part of "should make it more accurate" you didn't understand?
@@dantronics1682 Goes without saying! (in the USA especially!) Hell, they elected obiden president! Perfect proof!
Well I guess now we know why there's a parts shortage.
So all that electronic tests are exactly the same type as regular strip... That's crazy waste of resources
Oh, wow. Now we see how chip shortage actually happened!!! Sorry for those months of the fabbing process to make one of the nRF SoCs.
It wouldn't be too hard to have a refill strip for that test device though.
A version with replaceable strips seems like it would just make it even less reliable.
@@drkastenbrot Need to open apart the device to replace strips?
@@navadeep025 Cross contamination could be an issue
@@6alecapristrudel Possibly, yeah. Glucometer strips were coming to my mind.
@@navadeep025 excellent comment!!! I had just liked a comment right above yours discussing cross contamination but your comment makes sense. I suppose it depends on how fast blood glucose degrades and how fast a corona virus degrades to ensure past strips wouldn’t affect a new strip.
I'm thinking something like this could be repurposed as a pH logger using pH paper.
This product somehow beautifully summarizes the craziness of this year! It has it all, COVID, the cloud (no "AI" though 😟), chip shortage and privacy concerns. Amazing 😂
I'm sure they've built some garbage AI solution in the cloud to classify the data your phone sends them.
Then it needs to be stored in a blockchain somewhere to prove you haven't faked the results. And of course there needs to be some subscription element attached :)
So it connects to your phone and then your phone uploads the result, the physical location, your phone number, the contents of your all your contacts at a guess. This single use product is all about harvesting data. It is probably optimal for what it is designed to do.
@@itsevilbert Exactly. I installed the LinkedIn app and for years using the contacts that it stole from my phone it has been suggesting links to friends and former colleagues that have passed away. That was the last time I installed and apps on my phone. The phone is bad enough as it is without adding more cancer to the pot.
I'm already annoyed that normal COVID tests have plastic bins around the test paper, and a foldable cardboard tray for the test tube. But seeing this.... wow, if well engineered those parts including battery can serve a good purpose for at 10+ years. It makes my stomach turn around when it's single use.
What also disappoints me that these devices didn't seem to have tamper protection. How hard would it be to add an optic blocker at the COVID result port, so that the test will always read negative as it will never read a positive test line? Jigged electronic tests sounds perfect for some I suppose.
For some reason I'm more upset about the idea of throwing out the 2032 lithium cell after 30 seconds of use then I am about the idea of throwing out the very carefully photo-lithographically etched plastic-packaged (and potentially rare- thanks chip shortage) pieces of silicon. The idea that the entire device is disposable just sits wrong- at least diabetic testing uses separate disposable strips and long-lived tester.
EDIT: For those curious, it looks like Walmart would sell these for ~26$ each, battery is actually used for 15 minutes, and the advertised use is for domestic/international travel. So, the use case is more having an electronic record that a test was taken+when, rather then answering the question "Do I / my family have COVID". Which... that's a little more forgivable, but it does go back to "couldn't y'all make the strips replacable, and just pack 5 strips in a box/sell-refills?" Also, the marketing mentions that it's approved for a "single test", where as most other test strips require second test a few days after a negative. I'd be curious if the LED processing isn't tied to that- say seeing an effect that's difficult to witness outside controlled conditions.
It's a metaphor for the current state of affairs in "civilized" society.
If its approved for a single test that might explain the false positives TSP got. To get that approval they would likely have to have raised the sensitivity of the test quite a lot.
@@Microwave_Dave People do it a lot. Just get used to it.
@@Microwave_Dave Not everyone language is native.
@@retiredjan4714 yes, some have other mother tongue
you're kidding, right? all those components, plastics, optics, and even a microcontroller to read 2 blue lines visible with the bare eye? what a massive unjustifiable waste
I agree. My first impression was that is extremely wasteful. Interesting technology though. Too bad it didn’t work.
This kind of wasteful device should be forbidden. "Oh I'll get the electronic one it is probably more accurate" - no it isn't.
Yes this is super wasteful and should not exist.
Really interesting video, thanks for sharing! I'm glad you addressed the E-waste aspect of this, it really is incredibly wasteful to throw away such a lot of perfectly good electronics after just a few minutes' use.
I was disappointed at how much plastic was used in the Lateral Flow Test kits we have here in the UK, but this really takes the biscuit!
It goes to show that environmental considerations are still far too low down on the list of considerations when we design things, and we all need to take a bit more responsibility when we are designing new products.
I’m not a fan of single use products. But it’s cool nonetheless…curious why they had to have that much electronics just to tell you that there’s 2 lines present.
This one gives the wrong result which obviously undermines the usefulness - but for pregnancy tests, electronic ones produce a very consistent interpretation if (e.g.) one of the two lines is very faint. It'll also keep track of time, if the test result becomes valid after 20 minutes then invalid again after 60 minutes.
@@michaeljtandy adding to the line of electronic pregnancy tests: the consisent interpretation helps with people who might be in panic, or have difficulty seeing or completely blind! Sadly those electronic pregnancy tests aren't always marketed for the features you mentioned and often are pusheb because they're lying about it "being more accurate" or pushed towards people who would be 100% fine with a regular test...
@@Snakke40 yep, all you really need is a dollar store preg test. It's just as accurate as any other test. Besides blood work maybe
Just came to comment, like (good so) so many others, how disgusting I find doing that completely unnecessary BT thing. It is easier and better just without the BT. There is literally no advantage from it. Just making land fill garbage!
What a waste of good electronics.
It's a good thing there's plenty of components available, all will be recycled and none will end up in a land fill and pollute the environment 🙃
Really care? How many kids did you have? Think about it. If you are able!
@@glasslinger I have 2 heads, 0 kids
Sorry you felt bad, emoji is sarcasm
I don't see what value Bluetooth connectivity has added
My only guess is that oh so precious consumer data being phoned home the first chance the thing gets. Edit: under the cover of it being a handy easy to read interface.
Value, like many things, is a matter of perspective...
@@tacopete8111 good point
electronic pregnancy tests are the same. They are literally just a normal pregnancy test with a LED and photo detector to read the lines and then give you a digital output. Talk about complication for the sake of complication...
It would be interesting to trace out the PCB traces to find out the exact path. Not of the current, but the $$$! It is all about the $$$. Unfortunately there are millions of people who would rather trust their phone App than their own eyes, because if it is on their phone, it is "official" and must be true (and more reliable and accurate because: "Digital", "Bluetooth", "Technology", "Science"...). Who are these people? Well, you can always find a bunch of them in lines around a store when a new phone model is about to ship.
Very "green" device. Very helpfull for nature- enriches water and soil with metals and plastic.
The fact that it's very inaccurate and privacy breaching is also a huge plus in my book.
Didn't know electronic strip tests exist but I'm at least glad that the comment section is as repulsed as I am.
...no way I would install an app just to get result of a test, rather take it apart and check for myself.
I think the case is designed to easily break so you can remove the battery for disposal
The instruction sheet specifies "please dispose of properly."
That thing has orders of magnitude more computing power than what landed us on the moon!
This explains the Nordic N52810 chip shortage for a bit and why these may be the prioritized part and have already returned on stock...
Such a bloody waste. Someone should be fired.
try the NRF5340. Might Nice.
@@yaghiyahbrenner8902 Already designed with it and it is immensly powerfull, but the stupid tools can't even program the two cores in the right order to not fail.
Why would any manufacturer think this is a good idea? Why is it even economical to produce something like this? It can only be economical when it actually gets bought. But why does it get bought... how do they market this as being better than just a regular rapid antigen test? I am so confused. Something like this shouldn't be allowed to exist.
Excellent use of semiconductors during a global chip shortage, they'd otherwise just go into a phone (5-7 year lifespan), a PC (~10 year lifespan) or a car (20+ year lifespan) if they didn't go into this single-use waste of resources.
If these have been recalled, then there should be a ton of them that might be available cheap for reprogramming and turning into something useful. OK comment section -- instead of whining about the waste -- what would you turn these into?
wow, what a complete waste... Penny strip that does the job, $$'s of one shot electronics...
Electronics for electronics sake, dreadful waste and as you pointed out most of us have two perfect sensor's built in....cheers.
there should be a law preventing this kind of waste... meaning, just look at the amount of plastic, pcb, leds and even an ic, plus a battery which shouldn't be thrown away with normal trash - and all of this for A SINGLE USE!
all that talk about sustainability, recycling, carbon neutrality and then there are things like these...
they could have perhaps made it so the test strip is removable and you could recharge it for another test, still huge waste of resources, I'm guessing someone used up a government grant to produce these, else it just makes no sense at all
Im 90% sure i have purchased that exact same clear plastic lens set before for use in a custom encoder
one one hand, pointlessly IoT
on the other hand, covid test with a free unobtainable NRF chip
all they needed was a strip and a barcode to scan
False positives can be as bad as false negatives, not by spreading covid but by spreading fear and disruption. Over here in the UK we had what was called the pingdemic where people with the covid tracking app on their phones were getting pinged that they had been in contact with someone with covid and had to isolate for ten days, ended up with half the country self isolating at one point. I tried one of the bluetooth testing apps on my phone and at one point in a traffic jam had five unknown blue tooth signals showing on my phone.
Indeed, put a QR code on those basic ones and it will be as good as digital with some image recognition.
Maybe scan twice - before and after use - to ensure the time of use.
What an idiotic and unnecessary design, its not just more expensive but also less reliable than a direct readout of the same test.
Aside from the amount of eWaste for no good purpose, it’s astonishing to ponder what the BOM cost of those electronics are! Even in quantities of 7,000, the nRF52810 is almost $2 per chip on Digi-Key (in QFN packaging, not QFP). It’s ridiculous to design this much hardware for essentially no purpose, and I agree that there’s nothing this does better than a test strip with a QR code on it.
No wonder we have a chip shortage nowadays ... 🤦
Can you tear down lumen metabolism tracker plz...
well... this explains a lot about this global electronic component shortage...
One day Acorn Computers Ltd created the ARM chip and put it into their awesome Archimedes computers that ran RISC OS only to find later the chip used in single use COVID tests with less use than the computer’s mouse 😩
Creative solutions, but not so environmental friendly, research on such stuff is also huge to make it reliable product, it is better to put money to make better vaccin.
They never did isolate covid 19.
Just out of curiosity, did you by any chance check if the bands are fluorescent?
Often times antibodies are fluorescently labeled and it might make slightly more sense to detect a fluorescent signal in this kind of getup.
The apparent reason for the electronics is to provide reasonably secure documentation of a negative test result as required for some air travel or by some schools and businesses. Of course, this is arguably not necessary and quite wasteful for home testing in many cases. Also, perhaps the sensors are better at reading the strips than the human eye so that a single test is sufficient. (I'm ignoring whatever problem led to the recall.) The competing Abbott BinaxNOW test requires a second test between 36 and 72 hours after a first test if the first test is negative.
But how you can ensure that the results are based on The one person sample not another person? The producer should be fined for introducing waste to the enviroment and obliged to collect all used ones.
@@aktik6000 I don't like the waste, and I'm not defending the system, just offering some explanation. I don't know all the details, but the manufacturer offers an optional video observation service using a smartphone that provides evidence that the results are from the user's own sample.
Okay now I'm interested in getting my hands on one of these devices to see what potential there is and repurposing the hardware for something.
"To Err is Human; To Really Foul Things Up Requires a Computer"
Cool device, but not practical.. Yeah, I completely agree - that's an e waste..
Great to see it disassembled in video! 👍
I would guess the blue LED's are to stimulate emission from the wave of chemicals moving forward, as the blue light excites the test strip chemicals to fluoresce, so you have a pair of points, where you both detect that fluid of enough quantity has been placed, and that it is reacting as it travels down the capillary tube in the device. The time to travel from detection of first glow till second glow then can be used to calculate the wait time before doing the sense, as they have no real way to tell when the user has put sample in otherwise. No real amplification, just an antigen protein held in place, that reacts with a specific protein in the sample, and a separate set of antigens that react with something that will be in the sample in any case, like amylase, so that when the second reaction has shown a positive result, the first one is complete enough to tell if the test protein is there in enough volume.
Very likely the test is looking for the antibody protein, so immunised people will show up as positive for the antigen, which is why the test is now unreliable, as it will trigger on those who have had, or who are currently infected, while only being able to reliably tell those who are not immunised apart.
You could make a reusable machine, just swap out the optical detection to resistance or conductivity, using the same chemical paths that glucose monitors use, where you have a disposable test strip. Same detection methods as used there, where the original versions were human read optical tests, but all went to electronic. You might need the first generation or two to have a EEPROM to provide calibration constants for the particular batch, but the current technology has enough stability in manufacture that they simply laser trim the trips after manufacture to get the last tiny variation out, as the process has been refined and made repeatable.
Looks like a fascinating device.
I hope you don't get dinged for "spreading misinformation" or some nonsense interpretation
what misinformation?
@@nerddub Anything that is not a part of the "official" narrative. Think doublethink.
@@nerddub To late if you look at the description unfortunately.
What an overengineered joke!
Can it play Crysis?
Thanks for the video, I actually tried to use this test kit today, but when I connected it to my phone it told me it was expired. So I unpacked it and it was pretty simple. I swabbed my nose as instructed and dripped some extract onto the test strip and got a blue bar, I guess I'm not infected, right? I can understand why they made it like this and claim that the test results are more accurate, after all, people with visual impairments also need to be tested. However, how people with visual impairments can read their help videos and how to align the drip port is a problem they need to solve.
Things like this makes me wanna go double Thanos on humanity.
The factory that agreed to manufacture these and the company that created these needs to be destroyed...
for the sake of the earth.
All the manufacturing in that to be literally thrown in landfill after one use? How amazingly irresponsible!
.....but will it run crysis ?
or at LEAST Doom
@@nerddub The nRF52810 has a 64MHz ARM Cortex-M4 CPU, which is plenty fast... But 192 KB Flash + 24 KB RAM aren't enough. It also has no display and no keyboard/mouse. So the Answer is: No, it won't run DooM (and what is crysis?;)).
But the nRF52810 has a lot of digital interfaces, SPI, TWI and a bunch of GPIO. So you could install a display and maybe some input devices, maybe a bit of flash and some external ram and then someone might get DooM running. There is STM32Doom, which runs on a STM32F429 (also ARM Cortex-M4) with 8MB external RAM and the /doom/doom1.wad file via USB-OTG ;)
What a gimmick.
I wonder if it could somehow be reprogrammed to be used for something else. Otherwise it's a waste of electronics.
I can't tell if it's more wasteful this or the single use lithium batteries to charge your phone in an emergency...
australia should keep economic balance to sell some rubbish to usa.
Everybody loves IoT until it's in a covid test
The fact that this is an IoT device is not the issue. The problem is that it is one-time use only.
This abomination of e-waste should not exist.
I had a think about this for a while and I thought maybe it could be justified if:
1. it used IR LEDs for better detection, but it doesn’t.
2. you needed to provide a trustworthy test result that’s self-administered by a malicious person who would otherwise lie about their result, but you could do that with a smartphone app.
3. The company has a perverse obsession with collecting people’s data, but you could do that with a smartphone app.
The only plausible justification I can think of is if:
• you want to mislead the consumer into thinking your test is somehow more advanced and accurate than the competitor by putting it in a sleek plastic case with a clean smartphone app.
okay, i was just gonna say, that those BinaxNow tests look like a great design, for not being encased in plastic .. then i saw, that the bloody things cost 20 bucks pop.
It is total waste of effort and money for the buyer as electronics are absolutely unnecessary. It looks as if it uses some precision electronic measurement e.g. gluco meters, but really it is just reading the markers which anyways user can do unless user is visually challenged.
This is ridiculous. What a stupid pointless device. A home test kit does NOT need to have any electronics in it. It works the same way as the lateral flow home test in the UK.
what a waste of resources for a single use thing :(
I am wondering how to read the stripe. I used water to do a control test and i get two blue lines ……… so two blue lines are negative? This design is just a waste of time … money … resources
Unless you are blind, and this device speaks the result, this is the most useless waste of resources ever.
Should be illegal to produce this kind of single use electronics containing lithium batteries, what an absurd waste of resources and cause of e-waste just to get a message on your phone.
Another way of sucking money out of the Cov Pandem... Now for the electronic manufacturers 🙂
In the middle of a chip shortage they build this fckn e-waste...
Why should this have Bluetooth???
CR2032 costs 7cent when you buy in huge Qty (good quality brand). What a waste is this test !
An absolute waste of resources and a battery. Most likely a corrupt organization making cash from fools.
Before I watch this, it wouldn’t surprise me if it’s just a lateral flow test with a digital sensor similar to a digital pregnancy test, but at 10 times the price of the ‘free’ LFT ones here in 🇬🇧
@1:28 yup, that’s the one I’m talking about 😂
IF you test positive you isolate, not quarantine.
Yep, what a waste,knowing the USA manly uses landfill site… the battery….
Куда смотрит Гретта?
Much like others in the comments section I thought "Hang on, that SoC is such a waste in that", but it turns out it is useful for no more than a cheap mouse or an expensive smart remote control, so for that I applaud them, otherwise, the device seems a terrible waste.
Bluetooth input devices typically use much cheaper, lower-end chips. This is seriously overkill.
Electronically it said positive but when I opened it up only one line not even the faintest hint of another
What a pointless waste of technology/resources.
These things should be banned. Everybody is talking about CO2 waste and then I see this. What a waste. This should be reusable with exchangable strips or strip cassettes.
there is a chip shortage out there and they are making single use electronic tests?
What an obscene waste of resources for a single use product.
Be aware that PCR over 25 cycles also has a false positive rate of more than 50%. This was tested based on snort culture.
Disgusting.
What a waste of electronics.
Like so many things... "How can we make this more expensive and have an excuse to justify it?"
Insulin instantly comes to mind as another but the "philosophy" is everywhere.
Incredible waste of resources. I can go you one better, take a look at single use sleep study devices. This has sensors you attach to you finger i guess to measures blood oxygen levels and possibly heart rate. There is also a sensor that you tape to your chest and a 'watch' you wear on you wrist with Bluetooth connectivity. Instructions say to toss it all in the trash in the morning. Pretty disgusting. Im sure insurance and all of us are paying a pretty penny for this ewaste. I dont know how much this ellume device is but maybe it could be repurposed as a simple dev board seeing as it has lots if bed of nails test points?
As some other commenter said, tossing those lithium batteries by the millions into the trash really isnt helping either.
I am constantly astounded by the pointless creation of electronic devices that are thrown away too soon....this is a shocking single use tragedy and if we carry on doing this we deserve to lose our place on the planet
I was thinking what exactly wrong with it...
EVERYTHING is. Only actual reason for something like this to exist is make sure they know when you got positive result
I had ordered 12 free tests through USPS and got a box full of these tests. I can’t believe the amount of electronics put into a one-time use test that are just going to get thrown out, when all you really need is the test strip in the middle of the test device. It’s also needlessly more complicated than just reading lines that appear on a regular at-home test - like you need to download an app, connect the device, and it makes you wait the full 15 minutes when with the regular tests, you’ll usually see results within half that time, so if they think it’s a solution to make testing more easy/accessible then they are sadly mistaken. Such an idiotic, over-engineered test that produces so much e-waste.
Disappointed you didn't even test the 5G
Wow, a device that serves as an inaccurate proxy for your eyeballs, shut up and take my money.
Well, isn't that nice. The whole world is hampered by a component shortage and then you got a one-time-use item like this with perfectly fine parts land in the trash. Not that a device like this would be a good idea at any other time. Resource waste like this has to be taxed into oblivion.
how absolutely wasteful! Why isn't there an international body set up already to deem which products are worth producing and which are not? could curb so much e-waste