Predictive Framework Development for User-Friendly On-Site Glucose Detection

This study explores a smartphone-based spot detection framework for glucose in a rapid, simple, and affordable paper-based analytical device (PAD), which employs machine-learning algorithms to estimate various glucose concentrations. Herein, two different detection mixtures were chosen with chitosan (C) and without chitosan (WC) for the color change analysis. Being a biopolymer, chitosan improves the analytical performance of PADs when used with a chromogenic agent. Moreover, the influence of the illumination conditions and camera optics on the professed color of glucose strips was observed by choosing various illumination conditions and different smartphones. Hence, this study focuses on developing a framework for smartphone-based simple and user-friendly spot-based glucose detection (with a concentration range of 10-40 mM) at any illumination conditions and in any direction of illumination. Additionally, the combination of color spaces and machine-learning algorithms was applied for the signal enhancement. It was observed that the machine learning classifiers, cubic support vector machine (SVM) and narrow neutral network show higher accuracy for the WC samples, which are 92.7 and 92.3%, respectively. The samples with chitosan show higher accuracy for the linear discriminant and quadratic SVM classifiers, which are 94.1 and 93.9%, respectively. Simultaneously, cubic SVM shows ∼93% accuracy for both cases. In order to assess the performance of the devices, a blind test was also conducted. This study demonstrates the potential of the developed system for initial disease screening at the user end. By incorporating machine learning techniques, the platform can provide reliable and accurate results, thus paving the way for estimating the accuracy of the results for improved initial healthcare screening and diagnosis of any disease.