A clip-on device turns a simple smartphone into a scientific microscope

Researchers from Australia’s Centre of Excellence for Nanoscale BioPhotonics unveiled a new clip-on microscope that will drastically bring down the time for disease diagnosis across the globe, especially in developing countries. This 3-D-printed device can transform a smartphone into a fully operational microscope.

Unlike other smartphone microscopes in the past, the clip-on technology is unique in the sense that it requires no external power or light source to work yet offers high-powered microscopic performance in a robust and mobile handheld package, reports Phys.org.

And the best part is, the researchers are making the technology freely available, sharing the 3D printing files publicly so that anyone can turn their smartphones into microscopes.

According to Dr. Antony Orth, the lead developer of this project, “We've designed a simple mobile phone microscope that takes advantage of the integrated illumination available with nearly all smartphone cameras,” reported Phys.org. These internal illumination tunnels guide light from the camera flash to illuminate the sample, making the device require no external light or power source.

“Almost all other phone-based microscopes use externally powered light sources while there's a perfectly good flash on the phone itself. External LEDs and power sources can make these other systems surprisingly complex, bulky and difficult to assemble,” Orth explained.

One can start using the microscope by following a simple assembly step and it requires no additional illumination optics. This significantly reduces the cost and complexity of assembly. Importantly, the device is accessible to anyone with basic 3D printing capabilities.

“The added dark-field functionality lets us observe samples that are nearly invisible under conventional bright-field operation such as cells in media. Having both capabilities in such a small device is extremely beneficial and increases the range of activity that the microscope can be successfully used for,” Orth told Phys.org.

Orth believes that the potential applications for the smartphone microscope are enormous.

“Powerful microscopes can be few and far between in some regions. They're often only found in larger population centres and not in remote or smaller communities. Yet their use in these areas can be essential — for determining water quality for drinking, through to analysing blood samples for parasites, or for disease diagnosis including malaria,” says Orth.

The findings were published in a paper titled, "A dual-mode mobile phone microscope using the onboard camera flash and ambient light", which Orth authored alongside, E. R. Wilson, J. G. Thompson and B. C. Gibson.

The paper points out - “With this design, we demonstrated both brightfield and darkfield microscopic imaging, including the visualisation of cell nuclei in unlabelled cells and dynamic imaging of live cattle sperm and zooplankton. This device has the potential to be used as a general microscopy platform for a wide range of applications from biological fieldwork to microfluidic lab on a chip monitoring.”