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Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Lateral flow assays (LFA) tests have become ubiquitous within the general public; they are the format for standard home pregnancy and COVID-19 tests, indicating a positive result with a colored line, and a negative result with no colored line. In their current iteration, these tests are largely qualitative and binary in their outputs.

[...] In a paper published Aug. 17 in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, members of the lab of Professor Tim Swager, led by postdoc Jie Li and graduate student Weize Yuan, reveal the design for a new generation of LFA that uses conductivity (or resistivity) changes in an electronic polymer to create the response.

Electrical resistance (or conductance) is universal in electronic devices. It can be readily measured with great accuracy, and prior research has shown that the group's electronic LFAs have both intrinsic quantitative capabilities and ultra-high sensitivity. The approach of the MIT team generates base signals in which the resistance can change by 700,000 percent, and with these strong signals, can detect trace quantities of a target biomarker. The electronic-LFA uses a biological trigger employing the well-known enzyme glucose oxidase. It was shown to be able to monitor glucose, but this LFA is far more than a glucose meter.

[...] When this electronic LFA is integrated into a resonant radio frequency circuit, users can power and read the device with a conventional smartphone. As a result, the passive LFA-RFID devices can be used at home without a specialized reader. With this in mind, electronic LFA has enormous potential in home health care diagnostics and environmental monitoring.

Your smartphone will be able to read it, but I'm sure the information will need to go back to some company server before they will tell you what the measurements mean.

Journal Reference:
Jie Li et al, Wireless Lateral Flow Device for Biosensing, JACS (2022). DOI: 10.1021/jacs.2c06579

Original Submission