Smartphone-Based Blood Lipid Data Acquisition for Cardiovascular Disease Management in Internet of Medical Things

With the ubiquitous deployment of smartphones worldwide recently, biomedical diagnostic devices based on smartphones are potential to be widely used for smart health management on the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) applications under point-of-care (PoC) settings. Therefore, this paper introduces one smartphone-based blood lipid data acquisition dongle to monitor blood lipid level, including total cholesterol (TC), triglycerides (TG), and high-density lipoprotein cholesterol (HDL-C), using only a fingertip blood drop for cardiovascular disease management. During detection, a thin photochemical test strip that consists of LEDs and detectors is plugged into the compact dongle, where changed color intensities will indicate the lipid determinant concentration from the measured reflection coefficient of the chromogenic product. Such smartphone-based photochemical blood lipid data acquisition dongle was validated by comparing with a clinical analyzer, and reached a correlation coefficient over 0.903 and averaged coefficient of variation (CV)% of 4.575% for blood lipid measurement of 115 patients. The photochemical dongle is, therefore, promising for the future chronic disease management in the IoMT.