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In this work, a smartphone based optical platform for colorimetric analysis of blood hematocrit using a disposable microfluidic device is designed, implemented and fully characterized. Using an integrated camera in the smartphone, pictures of human blood in the microchannel were taken and analyzed by a mobile application. To avoid the image burning and ambient light effect, a unique light-diffusing model inside a white acrylic-imaging box was included in this platform. With the image-processing program on the smartphone, the developed device was successfully applied to determine various hematocrit levels of human blood from 10% to 65%. Furthermore, the characterization of the depth of the microfluidic channel demonstrated that a shallower depth of the microchannel enhanced the sensitivity of the hematocrit determination. The limit of detection (LOD) obtained from the developed platform was 0.1% of hematocrit with a sensitivity of 0.53 GSV (a.u.)/hematocrit%. Thus, utilizing the advantage of the microfluidic effect, a rapid and sensitive hematocrit determination was achieved successfully. With this, the hematocrit of human blood could be conveniently and accurately determined using the disposable microfluidic device, and then processed by the smartphone camera and mobile image analysis application.

A novel and rapid analysis technique using histogram has been proposed for the colorimetric quantification of blood hematocrits. A smartphone-based "Histogram" app for the detection of hematocrits has been developed integrating the smartphone embedded camera with a microfluidic chip via a custom-made optical platform. The developed histogram analysis shows its effectiveness in the automatic detection of sample channel including auto-calibration and can analyze the single-channel as well as multi-channel images. Furthermore, the analyzing method is advantageous to the quantification of blood-hematocrit both in the equal and varying optical conditions. The rapid determination of blood hematocrits carries enormous information regarding physiological disorders, and the use of such reproducible, cost-effective, and standard techniques may effectively help with the diagnosis and prevention of a number of human diseases. (C) 2017 Optical Society of America.

A novel device of smart pipette has been suggested to extract and deliver plasma from whole blood in a disposable format. By operating an on-chip disposable micropump, approximately 30 μL of plasma was obtained from 100 μL of whole blood within 5 min without any external equipment for point-of-care blood analysis.