ABSTRACT
The growth of ageing populations is expected to stress the demand on medical facilities in the coming decades [1]. A sensible approach to satisfy this demand is to provide essential services at hospitals while decentralizing routine diagnostics and monitoring. The challenges posed to the diagnostics platforms fitting in this scheme are numerous and diverse types of solutions are partly suitable, from point-of-care (POC) instrumentation [2,3] to simple home tests. Distinctive aspects of these solutions are the particular compromises adopted between features such as accuracy, sophistication, throughput, versatility, simplicity, mobility, and cost. Essentially, uncompromised performance at the expense of cost and mobility is typical for classical POC solutions, whereas disposable home tests for visual inspection [4] are strong in deployability and cost-effectiveness. Between these two extremes, there are emerging strategies that exploit consumer electronic devices (CEDs) as vehicles for cost-effective, sophisticated, and decentralized diagnosis.
