Smartphones as a Biomedical Diagnostic Tool
Smartphones have a great adoption and penetration in society as well as tremendous processing power. Applications developed specifically for smartphones enable users to perform complex tasks with minimal training and skills. In our group, we look to harness these aspects of the smartphone by employing it as a biomedical diagnostic tool. Using the smartphone’s camera to capture images of samples, colorimetric analysis can be performed without the use of sophisticated equipment like spectrophotometers. This allows for such systems to be used efficiently in low resource settings for biomedical screening of diseases by semi-skilled users. After the samples are prepared, the smartphone application guides the user through the steps required to create a calibration curve, and subsequently calculates the concentration of the unknown sample and provides a screening response. The whole process is quick and requires minimal interference from the user. Currently, we are testing the system with samples containing mRNA/DNA biomarkers for cancer.
Figure 1: Flowchart for the process of using the smartphone as a biomedical diagnostic tool