A free customizable tool for easy integration of microfluidics and smartphones

The integration of smartphones and microfluidics is nowadays the best possible route to achieve effective point-of-need testing (PONT), a concept increasingly demanded in the fields of human health, agriculture, food safety, and environmental monitoring. Nevertheless, efforts are still required to integrally seize all the advantages of smartphones, as well as to share the developments in easily adoptable formats. For this purpose, here we present the free platform appuente that was designed for the easy integration of microfluidic chips, smartphones, and the cloud. It includes a mobile app for end users, which provides chip identification and tracking, guidance and control, processing, smart-imaging, result reporting and cloud and Internet of Things (IoT) integration. The platform also includes a web app for PONT developers, to easily customize their mobile apps and manage the data of administered tests. Three application examples were used to validate appuente: a dummy grayscale detector that mimics quantitative colorimetric tests, a root elongation assay for pesticide toxicity assessment, and a lateral flow immunoassay for leptospirosis detection. The platform openly offers fast prototyping of smartphone apps to the wide community of lab-on-a-chip developers, and also serves as a friendly framework for new techniques, IoT integration and further capabilities. Exploiting these advantages will certainly help to enlarge the use of PONT with real-time connectivity in the near future.

Automated summary

The integration of smartphones and microfluidics is the best route to achieve effective point-of-need testing, which is increasingly demanded in the fields of human health, agriculture, food safety, and environmental monitoring. To facilitate this integration, a free platform called appuente was presented, allowing easy integration of microfluidic chips, smartphones, and the cloud. The platform includes a mobile app for end users and a web app for developers, providing chip identification, tracking, processing, result reporting, and IoT integration. Three application examples were used to validate the platform, demonstrating its usefulness in various scenarios. This platform offers fast prototyping of smartphone apps for the lab-on-a-chip community and enables further developments and capabilities.