Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Digital pregnancy tests have an internal paper test

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 161 posts

Re: Digital pregnancy tests have an internal paper test

#101

Post by MertsA »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #81
1001101 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And are people supposed to tear it down and dispose of the battery separately? (the battery is hazardous and has markings indicating it is not to be thrown away).

I'm confident that kinda thing happens at the waste processing plant. But that's making assumptions about waste disposal.

No one is digging through trash looking for tiny batteries embedded in disposable electronics. The dump truck gets unloaded straight on top of a landfill and bulldozers spread it around in the majority of the US.

Re: Digital pregnancy tests have an internal paper test

#102

Post by raverbashing »

davewritescode wrote: post #90
leto_ii wrote: post #71

Going over the conversation here I'm a bit surprised by how many people seem to prefer an unnecessarily complicated and obfuscating solution to the straight-forward one. The Twitter thread clearly points out that the electronics serve strictly as an intermediary layer between the paper test and the user. They just binarize the paper reading. This in turn gives a false psychological sense of security ("it's the comput…

I actually saw this last night and initially had the same reaction but had some time to think on it. Remember, for a lot of people taking a pregnancy test is incredibly stressful. Reducing the complexity of reading by outputting a less ambiguous result has a lot of value to some people.

Then maybe something needs to be added to the manual:

"If the line shows but is faded: retake the test in X days"

Or maybe the test can have lines with different sensitivities.

Re: Digital pregnancy tests have an internal paper test

#103

Post by avs733 »

leto_ii wrote: post #71

Going over the conversation here I'm a bit surprised by how many people seem to prefer an unnecessarily complicated and obfuscating solution to the straight-forward one. The Twitter thread clearly points out that the electronics serve strictly as an intermediary layer between the paper test and the user. They just binarize the paper reading. This in turn gives a false psychological sense of security ("it's the comput…

>I'm a bit surprised by how many people seem to prefer an unnecessarily complicated and obfuscating solution to the straight-forward one.

This makes many presumptions about the users and whether to them this design is unnecessarily complicated or obfuscating. Beyond whether it actually is for them or not, advertising works or people wouldn't do it...the old tech has been labeled and messaged and reinforced for years as confusing to the point that it can become a normative perception whether or not it is true.

Re: Digital pregnancy tests have an internal paper test

#104

Post by _zzaw »

I saw the beginnings of this on Twitter last night; not surprised it wound up here. If anyone here isn’t already following @foone, I highly recommend it. Their teardowns are fascinating.

One of the more interesting comments:

“This thing [the chip in the device] is probably faster at number crunching and basic I/O than the CPU used in the original IBM PC, and this one is in something you pee on and throw away.”

(Unfortunately, “...there's no reprogramming this chip to run other programs. We can't run Doom on this pregnancy tester, I'm sorry.”)

Re: Digital pregnancy tests have an internal paper test

#105

Post by guruz »

askvictor wrote: post #3

While the waste is lamentable, perhaps it's also worth considering this as a UI/UX problem. How many people mis-read the paper test vs how much extra error % does the circuitry introduce?

This is explained in the tweet here: https://twitter.com/RealSexyCyborg/status/130179943992159027...

Re: Digital pregnancy tests have an internal paper test

#106

Post by titzer »

runbyfruity wrote: post #48
tobinfricke wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also like the part that it has as much CPU power as the original IBM PC but it's literally something you pee on and then throw away!

And then it sits in a landfill for eternity! Imagine how many millions of tiny computers (and batteries - oof) are just sitting in dumps right now. That's the most egregious part for me: this test is exactly the same as the analog one, but it generates eWaste.

If there is an engineer afterlife, then we got some serious hell to pay for how wasteful we are collectively.

Re: Digital pregnancy tests have an internal paper test

#107

Post by titzer »

dwighttk wrote: post #86
stuaxo wrote: post #78

As pointed out on the twitter thread. If a digital test is wanted, there's no reason it couldn't accept exactly the kind of disposable strip it contains. That way the part that is going to become ewaste could at least be re-usable.

Single use is (/can be) sterile when used once. How do you make sure it is clean on second use? Do paper test strips include a wick?

If only there existed ways of cleaning things.

Re: Digital pregnancy tests have an internal paper test

#108

Post by underbluewaters »

stuaxo wrote: post #78

As pointed out on the twitter thread. If a digital test is wanted, there's no reason it couldn't accept exactly the kind of disposable strip it contains. That way the part that is going to become ewaste could at least be re-usable.

You'd have to make sure the diodes were exactly lined up with the strip in order to avoid false negatives. That doesn't seem like a risk worth taking to save a few bucks. Maybe some sort of cartridge system could be developed.

Re: Digital pregnancy tests have an internal paper test

#109

Post by fortran77 »

hidroto wrote: post #93

still better then toads https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pregnancy_test#History

Or rabbits! (I'm old enough to remember people joking by saying "the rabbit died" to mean they have an unplanned pregnancy)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabbit_test

Post reply on HN