Cradle Turns Smartphone into Biosensor

A unique cradle and app for the iPhone use the phone's own camera and processing power to create a handheld biosensor capable of detecting any kind of biological molecules or cells.

The system, developed at the University of Illinois, could allow researchers and physicians to conduct field tests for environmental toxins, medical diagnostics, food safety and more with their smartphones.

"We're interested in biodetection that needs to be performed outside of the laboratory," said team leader Brian Cunningham, a professor of electrical and computer engineering and of bioengineering at the university. "Smartphones are making a big impact on our society — the way we get our information, the way we communicate. And they have really powerful computing capability and imaging. A lot of medical conditions might be monitored very inexpensively and noninvasively using mobile platforms like phones. They can detect molecular things, like pathogens, disease biomarkers or DNA, things that are currently only done in big diagnostic labs with lots of expense and large volumes of blood."

Having such sensitive biosensing capabilities in the field could enable on-the-spot tracking of groundwater contamination, combine the phone's GPS data with biosensing data to map the spread of pathogens, or provide immediate and inexpensive medical diagnostic tests in field clinics or contaminant checks in the food processing and distribution chain.

University of Illinois researchers have developed a cradle and app for the iPhone to make a handheld biosensor that uses the phone's own camera and processing power to detect any kind of biological molecules or cells. Courtesy of Brian T. Cunningham.

The wedge-shaped cradle contains optical components, such as lenses and filters, found in much larger and more expensive laboratory devices. It holds the phone's camera in alignment with the optical components.

At the heart of the biosensor is a photonic crystal that reflects only one wavelength of light while the rest of the spectrum passes through. When anything biological attaches to the crystal — such as protein, cells, pathogens or DNA — the reflected color shifts from a shorter to a longer wavelength.

To use the iPhone biosensor, a normal microscope slide, primed to react to a specific target molecule, is coated with the photonic material. The slide is inserted into a slot on the cradle and the spectrum is measured. Its reflecting wavelength shows up as a black gap in the spectrum. After exposure to the test sample, the spectrum is re-measured. The degree of shift in the reflected wavelength tells the app how much of the target molecule is in the sample.

The entire test takes only a few minutes; the app walks the user through the process step by step. Although the cradle holds only about $200 in optical components, it performs as accurately as a large $50,000 spectrophotometer in the laboratory.

The team is working to improve the manufacturing process for the cradle and to create one for Android phones, and they hope to make them available starting next year. Through a National Science Foundation (NSF) grant, they also are working with others on campus to expand the range of biological experiments that can be performed, to develop a test for iron and vitamin A deficiencies in expectant mothers and children, and to field-test for toxins and pathogens in food and water.

"It's our goal to expand the range of biological experiments that can be performed with a phone and its camera being used as a spectrometer," Cunningham said. "In our first paper, we showed the ability to use a photonic crystal biosensor, but in our NSF grant, we're creating a multimode biosensor. We'll use the phone and one cradle to perform four of the most widely used biosensing assays that are available."

The work appears in Lab on a Chip (doi: 10.1039/C3LC40991K).

For more information, visit: www.uiuc.edu