Advances in Smartphone-Based Point-of-Care Diagnostics

Abstract

| Point-of-care (POC) diagnostics is playing an increasingly important role in public health, environmental monitoring, and food safety analysis. Smartphones, alone or in conjunction with add-on devices, have shown great capability of data collection, analysis, display, and transmission, making them popular in POC diagnostics. In this article, the state-ofthe-art advances in smartphone-based POC diagnostic technologies and their applications in the past few years are outlined, ranging from in vivo tests that use smartphone's built-in/external sensors to detect biological signals to in vitro tests that involves complicated biochemical reactions. Novel techniques are illustrated by a number of attractive examples, followed by a brief discussion of the smartphone's role in telemedicine. The challenges and perspectives of smartphonebased POC diagnostics are also provided.

A fully battery-powered inexpensive spectrophotometric system for high-sensitivity point-of-care analysis on a microfluidic chip

“…The capacity for on-site or in-field testing from POC analysis is vital for immediate and convenient human health diagnostics, food safety monitoring and environmental analysis. 1, 2 Microfluidic lab-on-a-chip, with a variety of advantages such as low cost and low-reagent consumption associated with portability, miniaturization, integration and automation, offers a versatile miniaturized platform for various applications, 3–10 providing great potential for POC detection. 11–13 However, this great potential is often hindered by conventional detection systems, because most of these systems are devised for cuvette- or glassware-based assays in well-equipped laboratory settings.…”

Point-of-care diagnostics to improve maternal and neonatal health in low-resource settings

“…For example, recent developments in smartphone usage at the POC suggest that smartphones could be used to connect test results to electronic medical records systems. 14 Also, barcodes are commonly used in platform technologies to identify kits, reagents, and expiration dates, reducing the level of training required of healthcare workers and the chance of user error. 24 Finally, the recent use of quick response (QR) codes in lateral flow strips indicates that QR codes could be used to communicate test results among healthcare workers, to transfer data in ways similar to barcodes, or as anti-counterfeit measures for diseases that face many counterfeit tests, such as malaria.…”

“…It is important to consider the final context in which a technology will be used during the design process and to determine how this context will affect the definitions used for and the relative importance of each of the ASSURED criteria. For example, the use of smartphones in POC diagnostics, which has previously been reviewed, 14 has allowed for implementation of detection methods that previously required inaccessible equipment, changing our understanding of the criterion “equipment free”. Despite these shortcomings, the ASSURED criteria are frequently used in discussing the ability of a newly developed technology to be deployed at the POC.…”

Biomarker detection for disease diagnosis using cost-effective microfluidic platforms

“…An increasing number of new Apps and add-ons enabled powerful smartphones to have more and more functions for monitoring personal health status. 155 There have been reports of full laboratory-quality immunoassay that can be run on a smartphone accessory. 156 Therefore, we believe that the combination of smartphone technologies with microfluidic devices could cause great impacts on health care (i.e.…”