An ultra-low-cost smartphone octochannel spectrometer for mobile health diagnostics

With the rapid development and proliferation of mobile devices with powerful computing power and the ability of integrating sensors into mobile devices, the potential impact of mobile health (mHealth) diagnostics on the public health is drawing researchers' attention. We developed a Smartphone Octo-channel Spectrometer (SOS) as a mHealth diagnostic tool. The SOS has nanoscale wavelength resolution, is self-illuminated from the smartphone itself, and is ultra-low cost (less than $20). A user interface controls the optical sensing parameters and precise alignment. After calibrating and testing the SOS by quantifying protein concentrations, we clinically validated the SOS by comparing the diagnostic performance of our device with that of a clinical spectrophotometer. About 180 serum samples from de-identified patients with 4 types of autoantibodies were blindly read the ELISA results. The accuracy of the SOS achieved 100% across the clinical reportable range compared with the FDA-approved instrument. Furthermore, the self-illuminated SOS only requires about half of the light intensity of the FDA-approved instrument to achieve clinical-level sensitivity. The low-energy-consumption and low-cost SOS enables point-of-care spectrophotometric sensing in low-resource areas, and can be integrated into point-of-care diagnostic systems for rapid multiplex readout and analysis at patient bedside or at home.