NutriPhone: a mobile platform for low-cost point-of-care quantification of vitamin B-12 concentrations

Vitamin B-12 is necessary for formation of red blood cells, DNA synthesis, neural myelination, brain development, and growth. Vitamin B-12 deficiency is often asymptomatic early in its course; however, once it manifests, particularly with neurological symptoms, reversal by dietary changes or supplementation becomes less effective. Access to easy, low cost, and personalized nutritional diagnostics could enable individuals to better understand their own deficiencies as well as track the effects of dietary changes. In this work, we present the NutriPhone, a mobile platform for the analysis of blood vitamin B-12 levels in 15 minutes. The NutriPhone technology comprises of a smartphone accessory, an app, and a competitive-type lateral flow test strip that quantifies vitamin B-12 levels. To achieve the detection of sub-nmol/L physiological levels of vitamin B-12, our assay incorporates an innovative "spacer pad" for increasing the duration of the key competitive binding reaction and uses silver amplification of the initial signal. We demonstrate the efficacy of our NutriPhone system by quantifying physiologically relevant levels of vitamin B-12 and performing human trials where it was used to accurately evaluate blood vitamin B-12 status of 12 participants from just a drop (similar to 40 mu l) of finger prick blood.