Researchers at UC Santa Barbara and Santa Barbara Cottage Hospital have created a new COVID-19 test using an ordinary smartphone camera as a virus detector, potentially cheap and accurate for at-home COVID-19 testing.

The news suggested hope for tackling more than the current wave of viruses. “The detection system is among the most rapid, sensitive, affordable, and scalable tests known — and can be readily adapted for other pathogens with pandemic potential, including deadly variants of COVID and flu,” said the report published on January 28 in the journal JAMA Network Open.

The scientists used a Samsung Galaxy S9 smartphone due to the precise camera alignment and calibration to quickly and accurately diagnose COVID-19 (including multiple variants) and flu viruses. The researchers breakthrough was solving the LAMP “primer-dimer” problem of false positives due to high sensitivity, which scientists had been having trouble with for over 20 years.