A prototype drug testing robot has been developed by a team of University of British Columbia (UBC) scientists.

The portable robot, which features high-performance liquid chromatography, could be easily deployed at music festivals, for instance, where users can walk up to a kiosk and drop off a sample and the machine will reportedly identify substances — like fentanyl — in those samples in roughly 15 minutes, thereby potentially saving lives.

Source: University of British Columbia

“I think what's really cool about this is, it's lightning in a bottle. It's not that this couldn't have been done, it's just that you need a computer scientist or roboticist, you need that health care, you need that one team at that time that could say, all these skills happened to be in the same lab to do the same thing,” the researchers explained.

The drug-testing robot is expected to expedite the time it takes to test samples, taking the process out of labs where healthcare professionals are overwhelmed with work and results could take weeks to return.

For now, the robot is being trialed at music festivals where it will work alongside human professionals who are already manually performing such tests and they will cross-check the robot’s outcomes to ensure its accuracy.

Eventually, the University of British Columbia team envisions an ATM-like kiosk on campus where students can simply drop off drug samples.