Reconfigurable Technology-Based HIV Testing System

The HIV testing kits have become recently available to determine whether an individual´s blood is contaminated with the HIV virus or not. When a drop of blood is placed on the center of the testing kit, a simple testing bar pattern will appear in the middle of this kit to indicate the status of the test whether it is positive or negative. This HIV test should be done in a small clinic or in a lab and the test must be conducted by a trained technician. A smart HIV testing system was developed through this research to eliminate the human error that is associated with the use of such HIV testing kits. Also, the smart HIV system improve the testing productivity in comparison to those achieved by the trained technicians. In this research, we have developed HIV testing system that very accurate in analyzing the images that appear on HIV testing kits. We have used a system-on-chip (SOC) reconfigurable technology that based on field programmable gate array (FPGA) in implementing the system´s prototype. The system used a CMOS digital camera to capture the image and FPGA Xilinx Virtex chip to process the captured image and send the testing results to the display unit. The system can be used in small clinics and pharmacies and eliminates the need for trained technicians. The system has been tested successfully and the testing results shows that the system accuracy reach 100%