Scanadu’s New Pee Stick Puts The Medical Lab On Your Smartphone

Health tech startup Scanadu is working on the cutting-edge of a new type of medical technology that could one day put the hospital in the palm of our hands.

It just started shipping its first product Scout, a device that can detect your temperature, blood pressure and other biological phenomenon and then upload that information into an app.

Scanadu is now in the testing phase with Scanaflo. This is an iPhone-ready urinalysis strip that, with just one pee, knows if you are pregnant, diabetic or have been smoking weed.

We visited the official Scanadu headquarters at NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, Calif., to see how Scanaflo works.

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Scanaflo measures up to 12 reagents on the stick, including glucose, protein, leukocytes, nitrites, blood in the urine, bilirubin, urobilinogen, microalbumin, creatinine, ketone, specific gravity and your pH levels. The different reagents react to the urine and show up as colors on the stick. The iPhone app then detects these colors and determines what is going on.

This opens up a slew of possibilities for the future of medical technology. Imagine dipping a stick in urine and finding out you have an over-abundance of leukocytes. While the Scanaflo is not yet FDA-approved and is not meant to diagnose, it can alert you to something being off.

Should it receive the nod from the FDA, Scanaflo could reduce long waits in the doctor’s office and on lab results and put the power of personal health monitoring into the hands of consumers.