μ-Phone: Accessible Microscope Attachment for Smartphones

Point-of-care (POC) technologies have the potential to greatly improve the clinical lab testing and diagnostics process since they significantly reduce the wait time before getting the results. Microscope, as a very important instrument widely used in clinical testing, is a key component to be adapted to POC scenarios, and there have been various attempts to do so by replacing conventional microscopes with smartphone-attached systems. However, these attempts all utilized components that are either expensive or bulky, which greatly limits the widespread adaptation and utilization of these devices, especially in areas with limited resources. Thus we propose a design and prototype of <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">$\mu$</tex>-Phone, an accessible microscope attachment for smartphones using cheap and easily accessible components to minimize the obstacles to resource availability. The proposed system has a depth of field of 5.25 micrometers, a pixel resolution of 26.3 pixels per micrometer and a spatial resolution of 2.19 micrometers, which makes it powerful enough to capture microscopic images for identification and analysis at a cellular level. With some future developments, this system has great potential to be deployed worldwide for quick and accurate POC analysis of physiological samples.