Smartphone technology constantly improves, with each new phone touting coveted camera enhancements such as number of megapixels, fast autofocus, and better low-light performance. Those same companies can now add “infectious disease detection” to their lists of camera features. Researchers have discovered a way to use a phone’s camera to detect viruses that cause respiratory diseases such as equine influenza and COVID-19 in humans.

“As we have recently witnessed, upper-respiratory diseases can rip through communities quickly, leaving a wake of death, illness, economic losses, and major disruptions to daily life,” said Brian Cunningham, an electrical and computer engineering professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

One of the major contributors to the rapid spread of upper-respiratory infectious diseases such as COVID-19 in people is the lack of widely available testing that provides quick and accurate results. As such, communities can’t make informed recommendations pertaining to targeted quarantines to best control the spread of disease.

Similar disease outbreaks occur in horses—recall the 2011 equine herpesvirus-1 (EHV-1) outbreak involving 240-plus horse premises in 19 states and two Canadian provinces