A photochemical dongle for point-of-care evaluation of blood lipid level

Cardiovascular diseases are leading causes of death worldwide due to the building up of atherosclerotic plaques in the vasculature. As the formation of these plaques is closely related to the levels of cholesterol, effective measurement of cholesterol is critical for improving the diagnosis and management of cardiovascular diseases. With the wide use of smartphones all over the world in recent years, biomedical devices constructed with smartphones are capable of being widely applied in family-based smart health management. Thus, this paper proposes one smartphone-powered photochemical dongle for point-of-care (POC) monitoring of blood lipid (TC, TG, HDL-C) with a finger prick blood drop. By comparing the diagnostic results of 115 patients with the clinical biochemical analyzer, correlation coefficients larger than 0.903 have been obtained, which were highly acceptable and demonstrated the reliability and accuracy of the proposed photochemical dongle. The photochemical dongle thereby provides one promising solution for the future POC Cholesterol diagnostics.