Digital pregnancy tests have an internal paper test
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A significant portion of digital meters used for servicing swimming pools require servicing/replacement of strips/chemicals (reagents) within the device.
Yes, there are also digital meters that work without chemicals per se, and have special electrodes that measure electric current. However, this approach quite simply doesn't work for all chemical reactions.
On a regular stripe test you are responsible to conduct the experiment and interpret the outcome which can be intimidating.
"Is there a line? I think I see a line? But it's fainter from the last time? What does it mean?"
This is replaced by an algorithm that's written by people who know what are they doing to save you from analysing a chemical reaction and have a straight answer.
edit: Just Google for "Is this pregnancy test positive" to see how many people are having trouble interpreting the results.
Here is an example from Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/TFABLinePorn/comments/4pxghm/confli...
Ironically, on this example the commenters claim that the inaccurate one is the digital one and the tester confirms. Anyway, the point stands: It is hard to interpret the outcome of chemical reactions.
The only pregnancy test intimidating reference I knew about so far was "omg, shit I am pregnant shit".
Also, for christ people, 16 years old were administrating these tests for years now, without there being massive social problem of confused woman. They just somehow managed to do them, even if their school results were very bad. So trying to claim they are somehow difficult to interpret is absurd.
The "analog" version is capable of displaying a value marginally above 0 and lets your eyes and brain decide or at least raise a flag. The digital test replaces your eyes with crappy photodiodes, and your (even 16 year old) brain with a crappy controller that just looks at a high threshold and decides "below=0".
I see people here saying that a digital is better because it reduces confusion. But it does so by discarding data. I'd take the debatable test every time, especially when for the money a digital one costs you can get multiple paper tests to do repeated checks.
Taking 5 papers tests is simple.
OP is only two cycles into their pregnancy. A paper test can pick up on this tiny HCG measurement and show something. A digital test cannot because it's going to pick a higher threshold if it only wants to give you a binary result. A digital test will tell you that you're pregnant when you're far enough along for a paper test to be obvious.
There are so many "can someone interpret this paper test?" questions not because paper is inferior but because they are trying to interpret results 0-2 months into their pregnancy and paper can actually give you a faint reading here.
A digital test could support that by showing "possibly pregnant" which is back to the same UX, and showing "not pregnant" during this time isn't much of a win either.
The UX advantage comes from giving a definitive answer. The answer can change at later times when the body starts giving stronger signals. You can simply indicate that you need to wait X number of days to detect the pregnancy and problem solved.
This is much better UX than learning biology and chemistry to be able to read a test result. What does a faint line means? Probably means you need 4 years degree in a related field to have an educated guess. To have a definitive answer you need a to have a career in it.
Realistically though, it means you will need to ask someone who already have the degree, which means what good is the test for?
The digital test does guide you how to get to the right answer. Yes, if the threshold is too high and you test too early it can give you a false negative but this is a simple problem that can be solved by recommending a second test in few days.
If you’re well into a pregnancy, tests will actually start getting lighter due to how the tests work. It’s called the Hook Effect and can start happening around 5 weeks of pregnancy (https://www.captodayonline.com/Archives/0612/0612f_not_so_ob...).
The poster's question was about the conflict, not the interpretation of the chemical test.
>FRERs can pick up hCG as low as 7. Digitals require >40. Try with a digital in another week!
This seems to me like you're replacing an analogue, more precise reading with a binary, easier to read, imprecise reading?
Yeah, sure if you know what you are doing observing chemical reaction can be much better. It's like the difference between consumer tools and industrial tools.
Full manual espresso machines are superior from the perspective of a coffee nerd or professional. Nespresso machines with capsules are superior from the perspective of the person who wants the coffee but doesn't fancy learning making one.
The UX in this case is bad. Unnecessary and expensive fluff that obfuscates reality and gives a false sense of certainty to the user.
> On a regular stripe test you are responsible to conduct the experiment and interpret the outcome
The part of conducting the experiment is identical, I think, regardless of the type of test. You pee on it. Interpreting the results is not an issue. You simply need to observe with your eyes (a product of billions of years of evolution) if you have || or |+.
> save you from analysing a chemical reaction and have a straight answer
Again, you don't need to analyze a chemical reaction any more than the device does. The conclusion of the analysis is summed up in [1]. The whole point of the digital part is to read the lines on the paper. Whatever heuristics went into deciding how much reflected light should be interpreted as a | or a + are just as likely to be mistaken as a human eye reading would be.
That could allow a more sensitive measurement than possible with the human eye.
People will make claims about UX et al but they're more a side effect from companies marketing a pseudo-digital device to gullible customers rather than the original goal of the device. And I don't mean "gullible" in a negative way because I've fallen for this trick many times in the past too. If you don't know the hardware (and most wont) then you can't be blamed for trusting the marketing.
Ultimately though, if a digital readout reassures potential mums-to-be more than a paper strip then at least this device does serve a useful purpose beyond tricking people for a few extra dollars.
I could imagine some reasons for pool monitoring systems - e.g., you might want to have the device perform continuous measurements and alert you if the results indicate problems - but that is not a case for a pregnancy test: People were perfectly capable to use chemicals-only tests.
Then again it is a wasteful and overpriced product that can leave wrong impression of superiority to the customer.
On one hand, what a marvelous thing it is. On the other, what a waste, single use of silicon, battery and LCD that'll go straight to the landfill.
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 computer that says it, not me"), without any credible benefit.
Why should I trust the people who calibrated the electronic device more than my own eyes?
More generally, why are people so eager to discount the reliability of their own senses? You have eyes and a mind which are the product of billions of years of evolutionary refinement. If you're not sure whether it's || or |+, pee again on a different test and compare; or wait a few days. If the lighting in your bathroom is bad, take the test in natural light or a better lit room.
My personal instinct is to rely first and foremost on my own mind and senses. It's of course important to defer to expert knowledge, but we need to use our critical thinking when deciding if something is the result of expert knowledge, or simply a marketing gimmick.
Do you as a layperson know how sensitive the test strip is, or how blue it needs to turn to have a reasonable guarantee against false positives? It seems like the engineers of the device would have a much better perspective on those things.
I might change my mind if it would surface that the paper tests used in the electronic devices were somehow different from those available to the general public and they were tailor made for the sensors and diodes in order to make the results more reliable. I doubt this is the case, however.
Are you sure they weren't just constrained by technological limitations when they designed the paper test? Maybe the reason the digital test exists is that a competent enterprise wanted to adapt the paper technology to better fit human capacities?
Even if that was the case, you can still frame the question in terms of cost/benefits. The electronic test is, let's say, 10 times more expensive than a basic one. Is it more reliable than taking 10 basic tests (maybe at different times) and averaging the results? Probably not.
Food that costs ten times more usually doesn't taste ten times as good. Perhaps twice as good.
It can still be worth it.
Convenience and time have value, too.
If you want, you can buy 10 cheaper strips, Try different lighting and times of day, then take the numeric average. I can buy a more expensive digital strip simply because I like the box's color.
"If the line shows but is faded: retake the test in X days"
Or maybe the test can have lines with different sensitivities.
When the user makes a mistake it's the user's problem, but the designer's fault.
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.
Welcome to modern IT, where complexity fetishests have ruined everything.
The day I figured it out those memories started coming back and it all clicked. I stopped trusting myself after that. I knew I didn't trust myself anymore when my 3 year old son would reference the bus I used to catch by it's color and I didn't know whether he was wrong or I was, so I just kept my mouth shut cos there was a better chance he was right.
https://twitter.com/gparker/status/1301711548193230849
@gparker: @DelMurice @Foone Congratulations! When is the endianness reveal party?
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.”)
And for some just the opposite... like 19 year old me decades ago -- ambiguous test result, and no 24 hour drugstores at the time so led to a sleepless night for both of us until we could get a second test the next day. It was negative. Would have much rather had an unambiguous POS/NEG result.
What I did when "we" were doing these tests (got 2 types both paper stips, one high sensitivity and one of the cheapest one) simply compare a unused strip and the one with pee.
It's not hard and the manual in the ones I got were really good. Like color pictures and lots of examples.
I’d think these things have minimum standards they must meet and so the cheapest test is just as good as the more marketed (and more expensive) one. Am I missing something?
A digital readout (assuming is pretty accurate) can remove this ambiguity.
The other benefit is for anyone who has difficulty with colour perception, or is in a poorly lit environment. I assume the device can read the stip in pure blackness leaving little enivornmental light to cause confusion.
But when it's all said and one, I bet this was created by the marketing department.
I supposed you could make the line words, but they'd be pretty small.
"The word "not" is faintly showing, what does that mean?"
It it was trivial to show a single clear indicator word, they could just show a clear indicator line, then there'd be no ambiguity. It's not the second line that confuses people, it's figuring out if that line is really visible enough.
It the digital reader can't detect the line, that should be a limitation of the test strip, not the automation. And it should do better than an untrained human.
https://twitter.com/RealSexyCyborg/status/130178603213683507...
Had to turn it to racism, not surprised.
There is now an opportunity for one of the manufacturers of pregnancy tests to make a reusable reader. The add could be like "We know you're going to test more than once, we won't force you to buy a reader every time." or "instead of asking the strangers if they see a line (cut to forum posts of tests) , let {product name} be your second opinion" Or even "Don't wait until you've missing your period, test every week for an entire year for less than the cost of 3 of the competitors digital tests"
Jamming paper into the machine is more error prone than not using the machine.
It may seem "pointless", but making the tests more user friendly and less prone to user error is super important.
https://archive.is/20081206110632/http://archfami.ama-assn.o...
Moreover, if it's such that even a trace of a line indicates a high confidence of pregnancy, users may misinterpret a faint result as somehow meaning "kinda" pregnant.
https://twitter.com/Foone/status/1301709777383292928/photo/1
In terms of probability density: https://www.allsensors.com/images/engineering/figure-1.png
[1] For the convenience of both those hoping for positive results and those hoping for negative. I'm guessing there are more of the latter than the former, because they're invariably located in the slot next to the condoms.
Thoughts from a not-as-fictional Rikki: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24349454
No reason to assume that being near condoms means people don't want to be pregnant.
Thank god for hackers exposing these shenanigans!
I think pricing a 20c device for $12, to trick people that since it's digital/more expensive it is more accurate is the shenanigans.
You can buy bulk strips for around 50 cents each, but many people would rather pay for the convenience of peeing on a stick than peeing in a cup and them dipping a test strip in it.
But in any case, test strips vary in how they work - some require a couple drops of urine in a specific spot on the strip, some say to dip in the urine cup until a dye mark appears. Is holding the test strip in the stream going to give the same result? I don't know.
we got a vertical bar |
and a 2 day wait because we were in the middle of nowhere... Yellowstone.
Sproutlet is 14 now. 8)
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.
How do you make sure it is clean on second use?
Do paper test strips include a wick?
I've noticed companies that build medical devices have followed the lead of big tech companies like Apple. First it was devices with non-replaceable batteries, and now: subscription services.
It's crummy.
I mean it's a toothbrush, come on.
The rule is (afaik) if you see the second line AT ALL, even if reaaally faint, it’s time to get some bed rest because you’ll need it in a few months
You are welcome.
Edit: replace Reddit link.