Mobile Health Technologies

Joshua Balsam, Hugh Alan Bruck, Avraham Rasooly

We describe here a compact smartphone-based fluorescence detector for mHealth. A key element to achieving high sensitivity using low sensitivity phone cameras is a capillary array, which increases sensitivity by 100×. The capillary array was combined with a white LED illumination system to enable wide spectra fluorescent excitation in the range of 450-740 nm. The detector utilizes an orthographic projection system to form parallel light projection images from the capillaries at a close distance via an object-space telecentric lens configuration that reduces the total lens-to-object distance while maintaining uniformity in measurement between capillaries. To further increase the limit of detection (LOD), a computational image processing approach was employed to decrease the level of noise. This enables an additional 5-10× decrease in LOD. This smartphone-based detector was used to measure serial dilutions of fluorescein with a LOD of 1 nM with image stacking and 10 nM without image stacking, similar to the LOD obtained with a commercial plate reader. Moreover, the capillary array required a sample volume of less than 10 μl, which is an order of magnitude less than the 100 μl required for the plate reader.As fluorescence detection is widely used in sensitive biomedical assays, the approach described here has the potential to increase mHealth clinical utility, especially for telemedicine and for resource-poor settings in global health applications.