Cradle of Optical Components Turns Smartphone into Biosensor

A University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign research team, led by professor of electrical and computer engineering Brian T. Cunningham, has developed a cradle and app for the iPhone that uses the phone's built-in camera and processing power as a biosensor to detect toxins, proteins, bacteria, and more. Applications include on-the-spot tracking of groundwater contamination and providing immediate medical diagnostic tests in field clinics. The wedge-shaped cradle contains lenses and filters and holds the phone's camera in alignment with them. Although the cradle holds only about $200 of optical components, it performs as accurately as a large $50,000 spectrophotometer in the lab.

Transcript

00:00:15 In this project, my students have figured out a way to use the internal camera in a smartphone as a high-resolution spectrophotometer for performing several of the most important and commonly used tests that are used in biochemistry and molecular biology for detecting toxins, detecting the presence of pathogens, detecting allergens in food, and doing disease diagnostics. So first off we're going to select a new experiment. We're then going to essentially take our sample and we're going to put it in the little cartridge position right back here. So here we have a little black bar, and this is essentially a location along the spectrum at which our sensor is resonant at, and depending on where that black bar moves up and down the spectrum, that correlates to a chance in color, which is essentially what we're

00:01:06 measuring. So we can go ahead and capture our data right now. All right, so there we have a spectrum right there. But what we're looking for is actually this dip right here in the spectrum. That corresponds to the black gap in the spectrum that you saw in the previous screen. And as that low point moves left and right across the wavelength spectrum, that basically tells us what the shift is in the sensor. And we're also working in collaboration with Professor Juan Andrade in the Food Science Human Nutrition Department to develop tests for Vitamin A and Vitamin D deficiency that can be performed in remote parts of the world on children and pregnant women to help make

00:01:54 they're getting the correct nutrition to help the children develop properly.