Biosensor based cell-phone integrated point of care diagnostic devices: challenges

Detection of infectious diseases is of prime concern globally. To meet this challenge continuing efforts have been invested to design easy, rapid, sensitive and selective biosensing platforms.1–14 However, efforts mostly remain confined to the diagnostic labs, because such diagnostics require use of expensive devices. Due to which diagnosis of infectious disease becomes costly and unaffordable to majority of population. Therefore, serious efforts are being put to device easy, rapid and cost effective methods affordable to all sectors of population. On the other hand, advances in cell phone technology especially in the area of camera and processor has provided good opportunity for integration with biosensing platform where simple, use and throw, inexpensive, rapid, sensitive, selective and reproducible biosensors could be designed and integrated to the cell phones. Integration of such point of care diagnostics to cell phones will allow accessibility of such systems to majority of population. For the successful design of Biosensor Integrated Point of Care Diagnostic Device (BIPOCD), following features will be desired: (i) Compatibility to maximum cellphone platforms, (ii) minimum intervention from user, (iii) sensitive and selective enough to provide reliable and reproducible results, and (iv) affordable cost.15 To meet these requirements, seamless integration of biosensors and cell phone is highly desired which is a very complex problem and requires detailed analysis. BICPOCD constitutes of two parts(i) Biosensing platform and (ii) Cell phone platform (Figure 1). This article will in detail cover challenges in the development of biosensor platform and to some extent cell phone platform.