Succesfull developement of Covid-19 testing device

80% of  Covid-19 infected people only have moderate symptoms, but can infect many other people (1).  Some of them are known as "super spreader".

In research program "COVID-19 Emergency Call", financed by FFG, we have developped a testing decive, which allows to test for the Covid-19 Symptom "Damaged odor sense".

Up to now, this Covid-19 Symptom, was asked qualitativ with question, have you lost your taste or smell ? At the beginning many people do not recognize, if their odor sense is becoming worse. The recognise, when odor sense is completely missing,but can not detect nuances. 

Der Genius5^(r) Anosmie Tester presents reproducable and similar for all test persons, a small and calibrated flow of odor in concentration of 1 ppm . The instrument uses 3 different odors and the proband has to decide, which odor is presented,  In research project we optimised odors and its concentration to detect Covid-19 infected people. We use 3 odors with high score, to allow to differ between infuenca and Covid-19.

One test instrument can test up to 1000 people per day with costs less than 2 Cent/test. Testing is done without contact, which is comfortable for the probands. No medical staff is needed to extract sample from probands nose.

Best practice  is to use the instrument daily for the same cohort in combination with weekly Antigen tests.

The Genius5 smell tester can be ordered in 3 variants:

G5_GS_Safe version, seperates Proband and tester by acrylic glass wall, operation is without contact

G5_GS_Basic version uses combined Proband and tester box, operation is done with touch pen

G5_GS_Light version is basic version without modem

Functional principle: The smell tester is measuring assoziation velocity by using stable concentration profil of odor. Because of this the odor recognition is only dependent on the amount of available odor receptors, If many receptors are inhibited by Covid-19 danages, the odor will not be recognised correctly, the test shows a decrease of the odor sense,