A review of smartphone point‐of‐care adapter design

Abstract

In this review, we explore the potential of smartphone‐based applications based on their unique ability to support portable, easy‐to‐use, precise, and efficient functions, which, in turn, makes lab‐on‐hardware a trending area of novel research. Smartphones can assist surgeons, physicians, biologists, chemists, ophthalmologists, and laboratory technicians in maintaining an easy‐to‐use, cost‐effective, and integrated environment for treatment, diagnosis, and point‐of‐care (POC) applications. These POC applications can improve patients' quality of life, offering patients a precise diagnosis and the correct treatment. This is a noble goal that aims to reduce costs and to increase the accuracy of sample testing, treatment, and diagnosis. Recent innovations have made major advances in smartphone adapters, providing portability, robustness, self‐powered devices, small‐sized adapters, and ease of usage. Lab‐on‐hardware is a progressing field, and smartphone imaging applications are increasingly expanding, resulting in POC applications with the latest and most advanced image analysis, enhancement, recognition, and other image processing techniques. The most recent studies in the field are explored to provide a solid background to interested researchers against which they can choose of application and/or adapter design they aim to develop, with a discussion of the methods reviewed here.

Smartphone-based imaging systems for medical applications: a critical review

“…In another recent review on smartphone point-of-care adapters, Alawsi and Al‐Bawi proposed that cross platform app development using Ionic or Xamarin as a possible solution. 53 Although cross-platform app development could help in principle, it would likely be limited to only the subset of functionality which is common to all operating systems and would utilize the phone’s built in compression algorithms. This would not be ideal for quantitative fluorescence imaging for example.…”

“… 13 , 51 , 52 Recently, Alawsi and Al‐Bawi reviewed smartphone-based adapter designs across a large variety of both ex vivo and in vivo point-of-care imaging applications. 53 Here, we characterize common materials and methods utilized to create optical, mechanical, and electrical interfaces for SBI systems with particular attention to considerations for the in vivo applications covered in this review.…”

Transport Phenomena at Test and Control Lines in Lateral Flow Immunoassays Reveal a Path to Expanding Their Dynamic Range

“…LFIAs are powerful tools for POC diagnostics because of their low cost and simple visual end point detection and have gained tremendous commercial and clinical success over the past few decades (21,22). In recent years, smart phones have become ubiquitous and the power of smart phone imaging is widely being harnessed for point-of-care diagnostics (23)(24)(25). Smart phones have already been used to draw quantitative results from LFIAs (26)(27)(28).…”

Caracterização e Mitigação da Influência da Temperatura na Fonte de Luz de Biossensores de Ressonância de Plasmons de Superfı́cie Baseados em Smartphones

“…Pode-se encontrar várias configurações de biossensores RPS baseados em smartphone (Alawsi and Al-Bawi, 2019). O método apresentado em (Pan et al, 2018) consiste em uma medição sensível a posição para rastreio de sinais RPS em nano-estruturas metálicas com uma pequena mudança noíndice de refração do ambiente através de uma luz externa de tungstênio que atravessa o biochip RPS, refletindo em uma grade metálica e um espectrômetro captura o sinal luminoso e o smartphone captura a imagem da difração de primeira ordem.…”