Multipurpose Optical Fiber Smartphone Spectrometer: A Point-of-Care Testing Platform for On-Site Biochemical Sensing

Optical spectroscopy supporting studies of the absorption and emission of light by matter is a widely used tool in analytical science. Recently, optical spectrometers have shown tremendous improvement on spectral resolution, accuracy, sensitivity, as well as miniaturization. However, most of them still only focus on single or few sensing modes, thus limiting their practical applications especially in complex sensing conditions. To extend applications, integrating with absorption, emission, and surface plasmon resonance (SPR) spectroscopy detecting systems, a multipurpose optical fiber smartphone spectrometer (MOSS) is designed to provide a point-of-care testing platform for on-site biochemical sensing. The MOSS is compact only with the size of $167\times 75\times85$ mm3 but has excellent sensing performance. It reaches extremely high spectral resolution as $\approx 10$ nm and has been successfully applied in nitrite, mercury ion, and sucrose sensing. In addition, the MOSS is equipped with inner power supply and user-friendly smartphone application, especially suiting for on-site applications. Since the MOSS can support high-quality multipurpose spectral detection but only using compact and cost-effective devices, it can be a potential point-of-care testing platform especially for biochemical sensing applications.