A Smartphone-Based Portable System for Rapid Detection of Pathogens

This study presents a smartphone-based portable system for rapid, automatic detection of pathogens (viruses and bacteria) utilizing a molecular diagnosis process. The complicated procedure including pathogen purification, isothermal nucleic acid amplification and optical detection could be carried out automatically with a smartphone on a self-driven, passive microfluidic chip utilizing a new punching-press mechanism. A low-temperature pathogen lysis process was adopted such that flow could be precisely controlled on the passive microfluidic chip. The detection results were colorimetrically observed or could be analyzed by an integrated color sensor. This is the first time that an automated portable system was demonstrated which could perform accurate and sensitive molecular diagnosis for either viruses or bacteria within 35 min.