An efficient power harvesting mobile phone-based electrochemical biosensor for point-of-care health monitoring

Cellular phone penetration has grown continually over the past two decades with the number of connected devices rapidly approaching the total world population. Leveraging the worldwide ubiquity and connectivity of these devices, we developed a mobile phone-based electrochemical biosensor platform for point-of-care (POC) diagnostics and wellness tracking. The platform consists of an inexpensive electronic module (<$20) containing a low-power potentiostat that interfaces with and efficiently harvests power from a wide variety of phones through the audio jack. Active impedance matching improves the harvesting efficiency to 79%. Excluding loses from supply rectification and regulation, the module consumes 6.9 mW peak power and can measure <1 nA bidirectional current. The prototype was shown to operate within the available power budget set by mobile devices and produce data that matches well with that of an expensive laboratory grade instrument. We demonstrate that the platform can be used to track the concentration of secretory leukocyte protease inhibitor (SLPI), a biomarker for monitoring lung infections in cystic fibrosis patients, in its physiological range via an electrochemical sandwich assay on disposable screen-printed electrodes with a 1 nM limit of detection.