Azodicarbonamide (ADA) is widely used as a flour additive
due to
its oxidizing and bleaching properties, but it reacts with wet flour
during heat processing and is easily decomposed into semicarbazide
with genotoxicity and carcinogenicity. In order to improve the efficiency
of food safety supervision and expand the scope of food safety control,
it is of great significance to develop a facile method for point-of-care
testing (POCT) of ADA. Herein, a field-portable and universal smartphone-based
photoacoustic (PA) integration device is constructed for quantitative
POCT of ADA in flour. The recognition probe Prussian blue with favorable
stability is loaded on a flexible substrate for fabricating a portable
test strip. In the presence of target ADA, the PA signal changes driven
by a modulated 808 nm laser beam can be conveniently collected through
the recording application (Audio Lab) of the smartphone. By combining
the economic test strip and portable PA device with smartphone readout,
it not only greatly simplifies the operation steps but also dramatically
reduces the size and cost of the instrument. There is a favorable
linear relationship between the PA signal and ADA concentration in
the range of 10–200 μmol L–1 (R
2 = 0.9928), and a detection limit of 5 μmol
L–1 obtained is much lower than the maximum allowable
ADA level in the extract of flour (388 μmol L–1). The present miniature PA device with strong POCT ability holds
enormous public health significance and economic value in the field
of food safety, especially in resource-limited settings.