German firm targets new era of Covid testing with three-minute smartphone eye scans
A German company hopes to usher in a new era of Covid testing with an eye scan that takes just three minutes to identify carriers and has a 95 per cent success rate.
Semic RF has developed its scanning app with colleagues in the US and hopes to start rolling it out by the end of next month.
It uses a photo of the eye taken with a smartphone and identifies the virus by means of a symptomatic inflammation called ‘pink eye’.
Managing director Wolfgang Gruber said that the app has already been tested on over 70,000 people and can process up to a million scans per second.
This opens the possibility of allowing crowds back into mass-attendance events like concerts and football matches.
“We managed to isolate Covid-19 from over two million different shades of pink,” Gruber told Reuters.
“You take your app, take a picture of both eyes, send it for evaluation, and then you can have the evaluated result stored as a QR code on the tested person’s smartphone.”
The app is initially being targeted at companies and commercial users at a cost of $570 per month, with a later rollout to private individuals planned.