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A facile colorimetric method based on a typical redox reaction was first developed for the determination of salbutamol (SAL) using a low-cost and portable transparency-based analytical device (TAD). The TAD was simply fabricated by wax-printing onto a transparent polymer-based substrate to create the hydrophobic barriers and the colorimetric reaction zones where the color changes could be easily observed with the naked eye. Potassium permanganate (KMnO 4 ), a common oxidizing agent, was deliberately used as a colorimetric reagent for SAL. Once SAL reacted with KMnO 4 in the acidified system, it could undergo oxidation and the color of KMnO 4 subsequently changed from light pink to orange. The color change corresponding to the SAL concentration could be clearly observed at the TAD sensor. In addition, the reaction color could be recorded using a digital camera and then analyzed by ImageJ for quantitative analysis. Under the optimized conditions, the developed method together with the TAD sensor exhibited high efficiency for SAL determination with linearity ranging from 0.5 to 40 mg·L -1 and a limit of detection (LOD) of 0.05 mg·L -1 . •This proposed TAD-based colorimetric method using permanganate as color reagent showed excellent performance in SAL detection with good accuracy and high precision., Competing Interests: The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper., (© 2022 The Author(s).)