Towards new forms of particle sensing and manipulation and 3D imaging on a smartphone for healthcare applications

TL;DR

This paper reviews how advanced smartphone sensors can be harnessed for innovative healthcare applications like nanoscale sensing, point-of-care testing, and pollution monitoring, leveraging their integrated and versatile capabilities.

Contribution

It highlights the potential of existing smartphone sensors beyond photon detection, proposing new avenues for healthcare and environmental monitoring.

Findings

Smartphones can perform nanoscale sensing and 3D imaging for healthcare.

Advanced sensors in smartphones enable point-of-care testing and pollution monitoring.

Smartphone sensors offer accessible and widespread healthcare solutions.

Abstract

Close to half of the world population have smartphones, while a typical flagship smartphone today has been integrated with more than 20 smart components and sensors, making a smartphone a highly integrated platform that can potentially mimic the five senses of humans. Recent advancement in achieving high compactness, high performance computing, high flexibility, and multiplexed functionality in smartphones have enabled them for many cutting-edge healthcare applications, such as single-molecule imaging, medical diagnosis, and biosensing, which were conventionally done with bulky and sophisticated devices. Most of the current healthcare applications are developed based on using the photon-sensitive components, such as CMOS sensors, flash & fill lights, lens modules, and LED lights in the screen, leaving the rest of the smart and high-performance sensors rarely explored. In this Perspective, we review recent progresses in advanced sensors in modern smartphones and discuss how those sensors have great, as yet unmet, promise to offer widespread and easy-to-implement solutions to many emerging healthcare applications, including nanoscale sensing, point-of-care testing, pollution monitoring, etc.