New Lead Sensor is Inexpensive and Quantitative

Lead is a major environmental toxin, causing intellectual disability in children and long-term health effects such as kidney damage in adults. The problem is widespread: A 2022 study in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that half of the current U.S. population had exposure to high lead levels in childhood.

Lead in drinking water is also a major concern, as highlighted by the water crisis that occurred in Flint, MI, beginning in 2014. The percentage of children under five in the city with high levels of lead in their blood doubled from 2.4% to 4.9% as a result, according to a 2016 paper in the American Journal of Public Health. The White House estimates that up to 10 million homes in the U.S. are still served by lead water pipes.

Nevertheless, the vast majority of people affected by lead poisoning are in the developing world. As of 2000, 240 million people globally had too-high concentrations of lead in their blood, according to a World Health Organization (WHO) volume on global and regional disease burden. Among children with the worst levels of exposure, 97% live in developing countries. For these individuals especially, quantifying their lead exposure may be impossible. Currently, the available tests are either lab-based mass spectrometry — which is quantitative and accurate, but expensive, slow, and inaccessible — or lead test strips, which are cheap but qualitative and often inaccurate.

As a graduate student at Nanyang...