Chapter 13 - Smartphone-based chemical sensors and biosensors for biomedical applications

Abstract

Smartphone-based chemical sensors and biosensors capable of point-of-care testing have gained escalating significance upon the challenges confronting public health, owing to their ability to provide insights into immediate and accurate information about individual health status. Updating and extending integration of various build-in modules and functionality of smartphones facilitates power harvesting, signal excitation, and data processing/analyzing of smartphone-based sensing systems, providing potential alternatives to traditional laboratory instruments. This chapter presents biomedical applications of smartphone-based chemical sensors and biosensors involving electrochemistry, spectroscopy, and flexible electronics sensing systems. Elaborate efforts were devoted to discuss the functionalization of sensing matrixes, design of smartphone-based portable systems, and implementation of sensing strategies. The various and versatile peripherals of smartphones such as Bluetooth, audio headphone port, camera, and near-field communication antenna not only enable data transmission but also power supply, which greatly alleviates the challenges of miniaturization and wearability of the sensing systems. Along with their applications in point-of-care testing, chemical sensors and biosensors based on smartphone are expected to open an avenue in biochemical sensing.