Prototype

Marketing Research

Current point-of-care:

BD Veritor™ system1 cobasliat2

Disadvantages:
-Special machine is needed to show the results
-Validated samples sources are restricted: only nasopharyngeal washes/aspirates and nasopharyngeal swabs

The advantage of our design:
-Only heater/heat plate is needed
-Even if no heater is available, incubated at room temperature for 12 hours can still show the result
-Result is reported by colour changes, no special demonstrator is required
-Throat swab is possible, increasing choice of sampling

Another benefit of our design is the involvement of subtyping test. None of the current commercial point-of-care kits is able to subtype the suspected samples, so subtyping mainly is handed over to analyzing laboratory.

Our kit is capable of subtyping …, providing an efficient way for frontline staff, such as immigration department and Agriculture, Fisheries and Conservation Department.

Consideration Criteria

1. Reliability
Almost all respondents prioritize reliability (ie. sensitivity and specificity) in the first place, no matter from local or international surveys.

2. Easy-to-use
our ultimate goal is that non-professional can also handle. For the sake of easy observation of the results, we utilized chromoprotein as the reporter so that no special reporter machine is needed.

3. Time
ordinary and typical diagnosis procedure always spend an entire day long. After the conversations with two medical experts, it is known that shorter the diagnosis time, quicker for patients to undergo medical treatment. Thus, we aim to shorter the detection time. Also, we have considered that heater/ heat plate is not common, or even unavailable in the suburb, remote districts or some developing countries. The reporter chromoprotein can still be expressed under room temperature, however, its disadvantage is that users need to wait around 12 hours. But still, it provides convenience to people living in regions with limited resources.

4. Prices
according to the result in Hong Kong, they mostly accepted the additional price ranging from HKD41 to HKD60 for quick detection, in which we are confident the price of the kit will be much lower than it. However, the acceptable price range of our another target group, people in developing countries, such as Bangladesh, Vietnam is only 1 USD approximately. If we want to promote our kit as far as possible to the above-mentioned countries, which is suffering from the influence of influenza, we need to further cut down our cost.

5.Others
According to the result of surveys in Hong Kong, size and ethic consideration got lesser votes, when we asked for the reasons behind, they agreed that smaller size of the product will be better, but the size should not have a high priority in the process of design. As for ethic consideration, despite fears were expressed by interviewees when we mentioned that E.coil is utilized during the productions of toehold switches, they felt more acceptable after full explanation on the whole flow of manufacture and further recommend us to add such kind of explanations inside the kit (ie, protocol) to allay users’ worries.