A low cost and portable smartphone microscopic device for cell counting

Portable smartphone microscopic devices can potentially address various imaging and cell counting needs in healthcare monitoring. In this paper, a portable microscopic platform is constructed by a commercial smartphone and a custom-designed slider-scale microfluidic chip. Here the smartphone acts both as a detector and image analysis station. We demonstrate the adaptation of a smartphone’s camera by loading a single-ball lens to function as a compact microscope, and then a glass slider or a slider-scale multiplex microfluidic chip is designed for preprocess of the samples. Our portable imaging device allows for micron size resolution and a home-coded Android application is performed for automatic/manual particle counting. Pumpkin pollen powders on a slider were counted as a demo test and then the counting for dairy somatic cells within a microfluidic chip were carried out automatically. The results from the smartphone microscopic device show good agreement with those values done by commercial microscope and flowcytometry. With advances in miniaturized electronics and smartphones, this low cost and portable smartphone microscopic platform can be used as common and convenient tools to perform true point-of-care biomedical or biochemical lab-on-a-chip applications.