DEVELOPMENT OF PAPER-BASED MALE FERTILITY DIAGNOSTICS FOR MOBILE HEALTH SCREENING

Mobile health technologies are emerging for population health screening applications. Current male fertility diagnostics lag these other health arenas in many aspects. This thesis provides novel methods to aid in and commercialize paper-based male infertility diagnostics. First, to quantify cell concentration and viability a smartphone-based colourometric imaging method was developed that corrects for environmental lighting conditions and provides quantitative measurements from paper-based tests. A fluid delivery system for the colourimetric paper-based assay was also developed. Clinical testing revealed that the device had false-positives from bacteria in some semen samples. To mitigate the false-positive issues, a companion method was developed to purify semen prior to testing. Collectively these works advance the technology and applicability of portable male fertility diagnostics in aid of fertility challenges worldwide. The Appendix reports additional recent work on the development and testing of a deep learning model to correlate single cell morphology parameters to DNA integrity analysis.M.A.S