Biosensing with cell phones

• Modern cell phones are not only ubiquitous but powerful mobile computers, with residual capacity to serve biosensing and chemical sensing.
• Difficulties inherent to chemical and biosensing characteristics preclude the use of single permanent sensors in cell phones.
• Numerous established and emerging lab-on-a-chip (LOC) solutions indicate the possibility to adapt disposable LOC and biosensor technologies to empower cell phones with biosensing capabilities.
• In order to capitalize the pervasiveness of cell phone infrastructure, cost and versatility of the biosensing solutions must be carefully crafted, to exploit the phone physical sensing capabilities.
• Cell phone biosensing using either reusable or disposable accessory devices can match the analytical performance of dedicate instruments, when combined with the proper biosensing strategy.

Continued progress in cell-phone devices has made them powerful mobile computers, equipped with sophisticated, permanent physical sensors embedded as the default configuration. By contrast, the incorporation of permanent biosensors in cell-phone units has been prevented by the multivocal nature of the stimuli and the reactions involved in biosensing and chemical sensing. Biosensing with cell phones entails the complementation of biosensing devices with the physical sensors and communication and processing capabilities of modern cell phones. Biosensing, chemical-sensing, environmental-sensing, and diagnostic capabilities would thus be supported and run on the residual capacity of existing cell-phone infrastructure. The technologies necessary to materialize such a scenario have emerged in different fields and applications. This article addresses the progress on cell-phone biosensing, the specific compromises, and the blend of technologies required to craft biosensing on cell phones.