A wearable microfluidic device for rapid detection of HIV-1 DNA using recombinase polymerase amplification

Although isothermal nucleic acid amplification is advantageous in pathogen detection in resource-limited settings, an electricity-dependent heating module is often required. Here, we developed a wearable microfluidic device combined with recombinase polymerase amplification (RPA) for simple and rapid amplification of HIV-1 DNA using human body heat. The human body temperature at the human wrist varied from 33 to 34 °C in the ambient environment, which is sufficient to perform RPA reactions. With the aid of a cellphone-based fluorescence detection system, this device detected HIV-1 DNA quantitatively ranging from 10² to 10⁵ copies/mL with a log linearity of 0.98 in 24 min. These results demonstrate that this wearable point-of-care (POC) nucleic acid testing method is advantageous over traditional PCR and other isothermal nucleic acid amplification methods in terms of time, portability and independence on electricity. This wearable microfluidic device in conjunction with a cellphone-based fluorescence detection system can be potentially used for the detection of HIV-1 and adapted for POC detection of a broad range of infectious pathogens in resource-limited settings.