Medical emergencies aren’t always considerate enough to happen close to hospitals or clinics, and all the professional equipment and trained staff that go along with them.

Now researchers led by a team from the National Taiwan University have developed a hand-cranked device that can be operated by anyone, anywhere, without a power source – and which can reveal blood type and red blood cell levels in a sample within a minute.

Those are two crucial pieces of information that medics and doctors often need to know quickly about patients when an emergency happens. All that’s needed is a tiny drop of blood for analysis. Details of the device and its promising early tests have been published in Biosensors and Bioelectronics.