A multichannel smartphone optical biosensor for high-throughput point-of-care diagnostics

An ultra‐low‐cost smartphone octochannel spectrometer for mobile health diagnostics

“…After light passing the top micro-aperture array, a microprism array was used to deviate 8 individual channels of light to fit the viewing angle of the smartphone camera. The design theory and manufacturing details in the microprism array are described in the previous publication [10]. Instead of using an external light source and batteries, the back side flashlight of the smartphone was used as the illumination light source.…”

“…The first type is smartphone-based colorimetric microplate readers which have been tested for different antigens of infectious diseases [6, 7,8] and for antimicrobial resistance [9]. The other type is multichannel smartphone spectrometer accessed by testing cancer biomarkers and proteins [10]. Although these high-throughput clinical-level mHealth diagnostic devices are applicable now, today, clinical samples from community or rural hospitals are still sent out to a central laboratory for testing.…”

Point-of-Care Diagnostics: Recent Developments in a Connected Age

“…These assays typically require spectrophotometers, fluorometers, or plate readers which are expensive and bulky. To bridge the gaps between high-resource central laboratories and smaller, lower-resource clinics where the ability to expand diagnostic testing capabilities is desirable, many groups have worked on developing miniaturized smartphone spectrometers which use detection modalities of absorption, fluorescence or photonic crystal based detection 139–142 . Most of these methods report single channel detection, or one sample monitoring per measurement.…”

“…Most of these methods report single channel detection, or one sample monitoring per measurement. To increase sample throughput, an 8-channel smartphone spectrometer suitable for 96 well plates was developed, which included a cradle to hold the smartphone, and a custom app to control optical sensing parameters and to align each sample to the corresponding channel 142 . Another device introduced a smartphone-based colorimetric reader platform for 96-well plate based colorimetric ELISA immunoassays 143 .…”

“…There have also been efforts to integrate microfluidics with plasmonic sensors, which are a label-free detection method by monitoring interactions among electromagnetic waves and free electrons in metals (including surface plasmon resonance and surface-enhanced Raman scattering 245 ) 142 . They are small, low-cost, can be integrated into a microarray, and are potentially very sensitive in detecting biomolecular interactions and binding events 246 .…”