A drop of blood is produced by finger-prick and transferred to the device inlet port. This is the only action required by the user.

It has been demonstrated that 97 % of untrained, first time users (n=2500) can successfully collect a sample which is good enough for clinical decision making.

It is important to follow the user instructions to ensure successful sampling. You will find all the information that you need for this here.

All Capitainer blood sampling cards are built on our qDBS technology. It uses a combination of paper, polymer microfluidics and thin water-soluble membranes to meter a fixed volume of blood. After applying blood to the inlet, a metering channel in the device is automatically filled and the blood is transferred to a pre-cut DBS paper disc.

In the 10µL version, one blood drop is added to the inlet and a double valve solution is applied where a thin dissolvable membrane opens up after blood application and removes excessive blood at the inlet. Subsequently, a second membrane opens up , allowing for transfer of the metered blood volume onto the sample collection disk at the outlet.

The 50µL version applies a single valve solution with another filling mechanism, to allow application of multiple drops.

The sample is allowed to dry forming a high quality DBS sample suitable for quantitative analysis.

The metering mechanism employing thin dissolvable films was first demonstrated by G. Lenk et al