Medical device company BlueSense Diagnostics has won Australia’s Good Design Award for its blood testing device Blubox.
Kristian Septimius Krogh
The company developed a diagnostics tool, targeted at emerging markets, that can identify the dengue and zika viruses from one drop of blood.
Filippo Bosco, CEO and co-founder of BluSense Diagnostics, said: “We’re very excited about winning this award, because it’s yet another international recognition of what we do. It proves that our device is solid, innovative, and fully functional. Winning this award serves as an endorsement towards the clinicians we’re meeting with to showcase the usability and human-centric design of BluBox and our patented technology.
“Winning this award also attracts more investors to fund our continued development and expansion of the portfolio of diseases we can test from just one drop of blood. There’s a huge potential in our technology.”
From idea to the final working product used by clinicians today, it took BluSense Diagnostics less than three years to have the first version of the portable BluBox ready for market.
For use with the BluBox, the company has also developed the ViroTrack – a proprietary cartridge which analyses a single drop of blood from the patient. Once the cartridge is inserted into the BluBox it quantitatively measures the specific biomarkers in the blood for several different viruses, thereby identifying the infection. Today, BluSense Diagnostics is able to diagnose dengue fever as well as the zika and chikungunya viruses – and there are more to come.
The Good Design Awards jury praised BluBox, commenting: “A potential game changer that scores high in every area. The BluBox involves innovation at every stage in the design process, including at the most fundamental level of developing an entirely new detection method that was able to be adapted to available sensing technologies and packaged into a robust and portable design. This is likely to have a major impact upon health in remote tropical locations with limited access to skilled clinicians and limited access to major diagnostic centres. When patients already need to undertake difficult travel to reach any form of medical assistance, the ability to achieve same-day diagnosis for immediate commencement of treatment is game changing in enabling remote communities to access modern treatments. Highly innovative solution to a big problem facing humanity. The scale of impact in addressing the human health issues related to infectious diseases across the globe is huge.”
