Keep track of your allergen testing – the RIDA®SMART APP Allergen

Lateral Flow based tests or LFD are a great tool in food allergen testing and food allergen management: Rapid, easy-to-use, ideal for on-site testing or hygiene monitoring, no measurement equipment needed. But how to document the results? We developed a little helper: an app, you can install on every Android-based smartphone, which saves and documents your results and enables you to send or share this data online – the RIDA®SMART APP Allergen 

“Every little helps” as the saying goes. The RIDA®SMART App Allergen is your little helper in documenting your food allergen testing results with lateral flow-based tests.

Even small amounts of a food allergen may be a serious risk for consumers with a food allergy. Prevention of unintentional cross-contamination with food allergens is therefore important and requires an allergen monitoring protocol. Lateral flow-based allergen detection tests are frequently used in the quality assurance of the entire food manufacturing process. Incoming raw materials can be quickly tested, the production lines can be tested before production or after cleaning, and the CIP water can also be tested. LFD test may be also very useful to detect where cross contaminations did occur.  

The ease of performing a test without laboratory tools or measurement equipment made LFD tests the preferred tool in on-site testing. Just observe if colored bands appear for the control and sample. Additional internal controls like a Hook line increased confidence in the results, eliminating false negative results due to too high concentrations. Yet reading the result without measurement equipment makes documentation difficult. Also, the color intensity of the colored bands may change with time.

Therefore, we developed an app, that can be installed on every Android-based smartphone. It is specifically designed for the Bioavid and RIDA®QUICK allergen test kits. Perform the test according to the instructions and use the RIDA®SMART APP allergen to take a picture of the result. The measurement result is now stored in the app, and you can add information about the sample, the test used, and the user or location tested, ensuring correct documentation. The results can be uploaded to your quality control system or sent from the production location to the laboratory.

To summarize: The RIDA®SMART APP Allergen allows mobile and efficient documentation of the Bioavid and RIDA®QUICK allergen tests:

• Mobile Documentation: Simple and intuitive data collection with an Android phone.
• Result Stability: Permanent electronic recording of the test results.
• Workflow Efficiency: Saving time thanks to direct scanning and saving of test results.
• Comprehensive Data Management: Detailed overview of your rapid allergen test strip data including information about the tested allergen, application form (food testing, surface testing, cleaning water control), matrix, test results, date, time, and user.

The RIDA®SMART APP Allergen is now available free of charge in the Google Play Store.