Blood Triglyceride Monitoring With Smartphone as Electrochemical Analyzer for Cardiovascular Disease Prevention

Nowadays, cardiovascular diseases have become one of the most risks threating human being's life in the world. The early screening and efficient management of cardiovascular diseases are critically important to extend the patients' life. Blood lipid level is a key biochemical factor used to estimate the cardiovascular disease in clinical situation. Triglyceride as one important blood lipid plays an indispensable role in the blood test. On the other hand, smartphone has unprecedentedly large scale users since the last decade, which paves the wide avenue for the dissemination of smartphone-associated medical devices. In this paper, we integrated the smartphone with the Triglyceride (TG) sensory module to monitor the finger pricked whole blood TG at the point of care scale. The miniaturized electrochemical analyzer was immobilized on the main board of the smartphone which enables the smartphone work as the blood TG analyzer incorporating with the disposable electrochemical TG test strip. The blood TG measured by the medical smartphone was compared to the results obtained from the conventional bulky biochemical analyzer with acceptable accuracy, which demonstrated that the proposed medical smartphone is capable of providing a point of care analytical device for blood TC monitoring at the medical level. Its potential in cardiovascular disease prevention and management was believed to be great, since the proposed system is ultracompact, smart, cost effective, reliable, and flexible with medical data acquisition.