A team at the University of Brighton is building a new class of inexpensive, environmentally conscious medical sensors that aim to make testing cheaper and more widely available.
Over the past three years, researchers under Professor Bhavik Patel have reconsidered the fundamentals of how diagnostic sensors are designed and built. Rather than depending on intricate production lines and specialist facilities, the group has created devices that can be made with commonly available 3D printers and basic electronic parts. The result, they say, is a sharp drop in both cost and environmental footprint, along with a design that can be replicated in almost any location.
Professor Patel framed the motivation this way: “Around the world, millions of people don’t benefit from the latest diagnostic technologies because they’re expensive to manufacture, require specialist equipment or simply aren’t practical to produce at scale. We wanted to start again and ask a different question: what would a medical sensor look like if it was designed to be affordable, sustainable and simple enough for almost anyone to manufacture? That’s the challenge we’ve been working towards.”
A range of sensors targeting different conditions
The method has already produced several prototype sensors aimed at distinct health problems. Working with Professor Patel, recently graduated PhD researcher Dr Chloe Miller and Biomedical Science graduate Athira Prasanth built a 3D printed device that measures sugars in stool samples with greater accuracy than conventional lab testing.
At under £0.10 per unit, it could aid diagnosis of intestinal malabsorption, a disorder affecting nutrient uptake that is especially concerning in children, older people and those with bowel conditions. Early testing in biological samples has been successful, with clinical validation set as the next goal.
A separate Brighton project saw research fellows and PhD students create a sensor that detects TNFα, a protein linked to inflammation in the gut. Tested in fecal samples, it points toward simpler, non-invasive tracking of inflammatory bowel disease and related conditions, and feeds into a larger effort to build an implantable device capable of monitoring bowel health and releasing medication at the site where it is needed.
The group’s work has also drawn in outside partners. Alongside the University of Strathclyde and the National Measurement Laboratory at LGC, Patel helped develop a sensor that identifies cardiac troponin, a marker of heart attack, at roughly £0.20 per unit; it registered clinically meaningful levels in human serum. In a collaboration with the University of Naples Federico II, Dr Miller, Patel and visiting researcher Dr Panagiota M. Kalligosfyri produced a fully 3D printed sensor, costing about £0.30, that picked up minuscule molecules tied to conditions including lung cancer during lab tests.
Sustainability and reproducibility as design goals
Many standard medical sensors are single-use and leave behind notable plastic and chemical waste. The Brighton approach treats sustainability as a starting condition rather than an afterthought, using less material, greener production steps and recyclable parts while, the team argues, holding performance steady.
Patel sees a shared thread running through the separate projects. “Although each of these projects tackles a different health challenge, they’re all built on the same idea: creating diagnostic technologies that are better for patients, better for the environment and easier for the world to use.”
The longer-term aim is a diagnostic toolkit that is cheaper, more sustainable and buildable almost anywhere. “Ultimately, we want to remove barriers,” Patel said. “Whether someone is developing new diagnostics in Brighton, Birmingham or a low-resource setting on the other side of the world, our vision is that these sensors should be simple to manufacture, affordable to produce and straightforward to adapt for new diseases.”
Closing the affordability gap in point-of-care diagnostics
Brighton’s strategy centers on democratizing diagnostic hardware itself, not just the price of an individual test. That direction sits within a broader movement, where researchers have repeatedly used additive manufacturing to bring down the cost of electronic and biosensing devices.
The same cost-cutting logic is visible in recent work. In 2025, a University of California, Los Angeles team led by Professor Jun Chen unveiled a 3D printed diagnostic pen for Parkinson’s disease that reads handwriting tremors through magnetic particles and machine learning; Chen described the system as inexpensive and accessible enough for lower-income countries, where conventional diagnosis leans on costly equipment and specialist assessment.
Another recent example is a pilot in The Gambia run by the British charity STAND, which is applying 3D scanning and printing to prosthetic sockets. Co-funded by the European Union and supported by the University of Southampton and Radboud UMC, the scheme aims to lower the cost and production time of artificial limbs while removing hazardous chemicals from the process, with a view to scaling across Africa. It builds on cheaper printed-socket designs that have already been produced for as little as €30.
Printed, low-cost tools are steadily lowering the price of entry to medical care. The shared aim is earlier diagnosis and treatment without expensive infrastructure.
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Featured image shows University of Brighton develops low-cost 3D printed medical sensors. Photo via University of Brighton.
