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. 2014 Oct:2014:312-315.
doi: 10.1109/BioCAS.2014.6981725.

A Low-Cost Smartphone-Based Electrochemical Biosensor for Point-of-Care Diagnostics

Alexander Sun, Travis Wambach, A G Venkatesh, Drew A Hall

A Low-Cost Smartphone-Based Electrochemical Biosensor for Point-of-Care Diagnostics

Alexander Sun et al. IEEE Biomed Circuits Syst Conf. 2014 Oct.

Abstract

This paper describes the development of a smartphone-based electrochemical biosensor module. The module contains a low power potentiostat that interfaces and harvests power from a smartphone through the phone's audio jack. A prototype with two different potentiostat designs was constructed and used to conduct proof of concept cyclic voltammetry experiments with potassium ferro-/ferricyanide (K4[Fe(CN)6] / K3[Fe(CN)6]) in a side-by-side comparison with a laboratory grade instrument. Results show that the module functions within the available power budget and that the recovered voltammogram data matches well with the data from an expensive bench top tool. Excluding the loses from supply rectification and regulation, the module consumes either 5.7 mW or 4.3 mW peak power, depending on which of the two discussed potentiostat designs is used. At single quantity pricing, the hardware for the prototype device costs less than $30.

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Figures

Fig. 1
Fig. 1
3-D rendered prototype of proposed system.
Fig. 2
Fig. 2
Simplified system schematic: The power harvester (a) transforms, rectifies, and regulates a tone from the phone to a 4 V supply. The microcontroller (b1) receives a trigger from the phone and uses the integrator (b2) to send a voltage waveform to the potentiostat (c), which runs the experiment. The voltage to frequency converter (d) converts the resulting output to a frequency to be transmitted back to the phone.
Fig. 3
Fig. 3
Potentiostat designs with TIA (left) and IA (right).
Fig. 4
Fig. 4
Photograph of prototype board powered by a Samsung Galaxy S3.
Fig. 5
Fig. 5
System power usage per block for both TIA and IA potentiostat designs.
Fig. 6
Fig. 6
Comparison between CHI potentiostat and both smartphone potentiostat designs. CVs of several K4[Fe(CN)6]/ K3[Fe(CN)6] dilutions were run with a 10 mV/s scan rate and 1,400 samples per sweep.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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