Paper based platform for colorimetric sensing of dissolved NH3 and CO2

Paper, a cheap and ubiquitous material, has great potential to be used as low-cost, portable and biodegradable platform for chemical and biological sensing application. In this paper, we are exploring a low-cost, flexible and reliable method to effectively pattern paper for capturing optical dyes and for flow-based delivery of target samples for colorimetric chemical sensing. In this paper, we target the detection of ammonia (NH3) and carbon dioxide (CO2), two of the important environmental and health biomarkers. By functionalizing the paper platform with diverse cross-reactive dyes sensitive to NH3 and CO2, their selective sensing within a certain pH range, as well as their detection at different concentrations can be achieved. The images of paper based device were captured by a flatbed scanner and processed in MATLAB® using a RGB model and PCA for quantitative analysis. Paper based devices with readout using ubiquitous consumer electronic devices (e.g. smartphones, flatbed scanner) are considered promising approaches for disease screening in developing countries with limited resources.