Competitive usb-powered hand-held potentiostat for poc applications : An hrp detection case

Funding: This research was funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy, Agencia Estatal de Investigación, Fondo de Investigaciones Sanitarias of Instituto de Salud Carlos III (ISCIII) and Fondo Europeo de Desarrollo Regional (AEI/FEDER, UE), through projects TEC2016-78284-C3-3-R and DTS17/00145. EB is funded by a Miguel Servet II contract from ISCIII-FEDER (CPII18/00025). GR is supported by a VHIR predoctoral fellowship funded by Amics del VHIR. Diagnostic Nanotools is a Consolidated Group supported by the Secretaria d'Universitats i Recerca of Generalitat de Catalunya (Grant 2017 SGR 240).Considerable efforts are made to develop Point-of-Care (POC) diagnostic tests. POC devices have the potential to match or surpass conventional systems regarding time, accuracy, and cost, and they are significantly easier to operate by or close to the patient. This strongly depends on the availability of miniaturized measurement equipment able to provide a fast and sensitive response. This paper presents a low-cost, portable, miniaturized USB-powered potentiostat for electrochemical analysis, which has been designed, fabricated, characterized, and tested against three forms of high-cost commercial equipment. The portable platform has a final size of 10.5 × 5.8 × 2.5 cm, a weight of 41 g, and an approximate manufacturing cost o

‘Plug-and-Power’ Point-of-Care diagnostics: A novel approach for self-powered electronic reader-based portable analytical devices

This paper presents an innovative approach in the portable Point-of-Care diagnostics field, the Plug-and-Power concept. In this new disposable sensor and plug-and-play reader paradigm, the energy required to perform a measurement is always available within the disposable test component. The reader unit contains all the required electronic modules to run the test, process data and display the result, but does not include any battery or power source. Instead, the disposable part acts as both the sensor and the power source. Additionally, this approach provides environmental benefits related to battery usage and disposal, as the paper-based power source has non-toxic redox chemistry that makes it eco-friendly and safe to follow the same waste stream as disposable test strips. The feasibility of this Plug-and-Power approach is demonstrated in this work with the development of a self-powered portable glucometer consisting of two parts: a test strip including a paper-based power source and a paper-based biofuel cell as a glucose sensor; and an application-specific battery-less electronic reader designed to extract the energy from the test strip, process the signal provided and show the glucose concentration on a display. The device was tested with human serum samples with glucose concentrations between 5 and 30 mM, providing quantitative results in good agreement with commercial measuring instruments. The advantages of the present approach can be extended to any kind of biosensors measuring different analytes and biological matrices, and in this way, strengthen the goals of Point-of-Care diagnostics towards laboratory decentralization, personalized medicine and improving patient compliance