Background

The contagion of bacteria in our living environment and drinking water is closely related to the health of the public. How to quickly identify the source of pollution and take proper actions right at the time and place of pollution has become an important issue. A DNA testing company works with Wistron Medical Technology to improve their product design, a qPCR instrument that is small, portable, and quickly delivers accurate DNA testing results, enabling real-time, point-of-care molecular diagnostics in many scenarios.

WMT’s Impact

When this client first contacted Wistron Medical Technology, they said environmental DNA testing is a very large and fast-growing market, and their innovative detection reagents and instruments can quickly detect Legionella bacilli that cause pneumonia in water towers and fountains of office buildings and community, however, their existing design and production capacity cannot meet the needs of the market. As a result, WMT gathered experienced designers and engineers to re-examine this qPCR instrument with the client and find opportunities for improvement.

Efficiency enhancement

The advantage of this qPCR product lies in the detection time. The common practice is: Sending the sample to the laboratory test center and wait for one to two weeks for the result. What if the molecular test can be done with a portable instrument, and it delivers the result within one hour? That’s what the client and our designers are aiming at. WMT engineers make thermal development based on the client's original design, so that the instrument's cooling time is shorter, as the consequence improve the efficiency of detection (PCR contains a series of heating and cooling processes, generate the polymerase chain reaction, copy DNA Fragment.) Our mechanical and thermal engineers worked together on the product's thermal module and optimized the fan design to optimize the product's heating and cooling efficiency. The result: Overall detection efficiency is doubled due to our design.

Miniaturization of design

In order to meet the scenario of environmental testing application, we have begun to design and make the volume of the products continue to shrink so that it can be easily carried to different detection sites while maintaining the same product performance. Through the work of our optical experts, we have reduced the optical focusing distance by 70% using a customized lens module, and the product's volume has been reduced to a size that can be held in a palm.

Design for Excellence (DFX)

Our engineering team doesn’t stop after improving the performance and size of the product. They also conduct the DFX to address the customer's initial pain points: The need to produce products better and faster. The DFX began with industrial design; not only did the product's appearance details and usability design advance, but the redesign of the mechanical parts made the product more capable of mass production and ease-of-assembly, which solved the problem of insufficient product supply to the market.

Through cooperation with Wistron Medical Technology, the DNA testing company can improve the efficiency of qPCR, reduce product size, beautify products and increase their manufacturability to achieve the strategic business objectives. In the future, we will continue to work with the client in the regulatory affairs for different markets, so that rapid environmental testing applications can be more popular and improve the quality of life.