Live demonstration: A low-cost smartphone-based electrochemical biosensor for point-of-care diagnostics

By 2015, there will be an estimated 2.03 billion smartphone users worldwide [1]. This wide spread availability of mobile computing has inspired a surge of peripheral devices that add health-oriented functionality to the smartphone, such as the iBGStar® blood glucose meter and the AliveCor® ECG monitor. By similarly leveraging the power and functionality of the smartphone, we have built an electronic module that, when plugged into the audio jack of a smartphone and combined with disposable test chips, creates a low-cost biosensor. The smartphone would control and power the module through the audio port and analyze the measured data sent back by the module. This portable molecular sensor is meant to augment or replace bulky diagnostic equipment usually confined to labs and enable numerous point-of-care (POC) applications, thereby improving the convenience and speed of medical diagnoses.