A household breast cancer screening device that gives reliable results in minutes has won a £30,000 prize from billionaire inventor James Dyson.
The Blue Box takes a urine sample and uses artificial intelligence to detect the early signs of breast cancer in just 40 minutes with 95 per cent accuracy.
Inventor Judit Giro Benet, 23, was designing it when her own mother was diagnosed with breast cancer.
The biomedical engineer, of Tarragona, Spain, said: ‘About 40 per cent of women skip their mammogram.
Inventor Judit Giro Benet, 23, was designing The Blue Box (pictured with the inventor) when her own mother was diagnosed with breast cancer
‘The Blue Box has the potential to make screening part of daily life.’
The device costs just £60 to make and lets women test themselves for cancer as frequently as they like.
Results are sent directly to an app on the user’s smartphone, without the need to attend hospital.
Miss Benet’s undergraduate professor helped inspire the design by revealing that dogs can detect lung cancer by simply smelling patients’ breath.
Benet has won the International winner of the James Dyson Award 2020, for The Blue Box, a less invasive way to detect the early signs of breast cancer using a urine sample and AI
Sir James Dyson called Miss Benet (pictured) himself to tell her she had beaten 1,800 candidates to the prize
So she designed it to process urine samples in a similar way to a dog’s scent system.
Miss Benet, who is finalising prototypes at the University of California Irvine, added:
‘Every time a woman uses the Blue Box she is feeding the artificial intelligence with data meaning the woman who comes after her gets an even better diagnosis.’
Sir James Dyson called Miss Benet himself to tell her she had beaten 1,800 candidates to the prize.
He said she had created a product that ‘could make cancer screening part of everyday life’.
Results are sent directly to an app on the user’s smartphone, without the need to attend hospital
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