Design of a portable potentiostat for electrochemical sensors

In this paper, we propose a portable and wireless data transmission potentiostat and further exert the amperometric morphine sensing and the potentiometric pH sensing to verify its performance. The proposed potentiostat has the ability to process the long-term electrochemical signals in both the amperometric and potentiometric modes at a remote site. Based on the popular General Packet Radio Service (GPRS) communication systems, we adopt a personal digital assistant (PDA) cell phone, rather than a personal computer (PC), to control and collect data. The sensed data collected by PDA cell phone will be transmitted to a telecom server. In addition, the data stored in the telecom server can be retrieved by a PDA cell phone or by a remote PC through internet at any time and any place. Our experimental results show that the proposed potentiostat has the merits of moderate accuracy, low cost, and long-distance wireless data communication capability.