New Pain-Free Needleless Blood-Draw Device

According to a recent MedScape article,  “a new and virtually painless way to draw blood for lab testing has the potential to replace the more than 400 million needle blood draws performed each year in the United States.

The Touch Activated Phlebotomy, or TAP, device, presented here at the Consumer Technology Association 2017 Digital Health Summit, could completely eliminate the need for tourniquets and needles.

"The process of obtaining blood samples hasn't changed in decades. A skilled health worker has to put a thick needle into you, which hurts, and patients don't like it," Stuart Blitz, chief business officer at Seventh Sense Biosystems (7SBio), told Medscape Medical News before he went on stage to demonstrate the new product. "It's outdated and quite barbaric."

With TAP, a healthcare provider places the device, which is about the size of a golf ball, on the patient's upper arm and then pushes a button, activating 30 thin needles that penetrate the uppermost layers of the skin. The resulting micropunctures do not hurt, according to presentation volunteer Mike Feibus, who is a tech columnist at USA Today and Fortune.

It takes about 2 minutes to suction 100 µL of blood from the patient's capillaries. "This device works kind of like a leech; you don't really feel anything," Blitz explained.

TAP solves the problem of extracting blood painlessly by doing it quickly, piercing the skin at a rate of 100,000 m/s².

"I've have had some bad experiences, when the nurse had trouble finding a vein and missed a few times," said Scott Sameroff, director of strategic business development for AccuWeather, who watched the demonstration. "When that happens, it's painful and unpleasant; there's obviously a ton of potential for this," he told Medscape Medical News.”

Still in the final stages of FDA approval, the device is expected to launch in the next few months.

To read the full MedScape article, including information about the potential for self-administered blood collection with the device, Click Here.