Transforming the blood glucose meter into a general healthcare meter for in vitro diagnostics in mobile health

Recent advances in mobile network and smartphones have provided an enormous opportunity for transforming in vitro diagnostics (IVD) from central labs to home or other points of care (POC). A major challenge to achieving the goal is a long time and high costs associated with developing POC IVD devices in mobile Health (mHealth). Instead of developing a new POC device for every new IVD target, we and others are taking advantage of decades of research, development, engineering and continuous improvement of the blood glucose meter (BGM), including those already integrated with smartphones, and transforming the BGM into a general healthcare meter for POC IVDs of a wide range of biomarkers, therapeutic drugs and other analytical targets. In this review, we summarize methods to transduce and amplify selective binding of targets by antibodies, DNA/RNA aptamers, DNAzyme/ribozymes and protein enzymes into signals such as glucose or NADH that can be measured by commercially available BGM, making it possible to adapt many clinical assays performed in central labs, such as immunoassays, aptamer/DNAzyme assays, molecular diagnostic assays, and enzymatic activity assays onto BGM platform for quantification of non-glucose targets for a wide variety of IVDs in mHealth.