Optical Biosensors for Point-of-Care Test (POCT) devices

Abstract

Point-of-Care Test (POCT) devices enable decentralized, rapid, and accurate diagnostics, supporting applications in different fields, such as medical diagnostics, environmental monitoring, and food safety.  

One of the strict requirements for POCT devices lies into the ability to monitor different analytes by keeping the measurement setup unchanged. In addition to this, another important criterion in POCT development relies into the possibility to sweep different concentration ranges, thus being able to tailor the detection range to the specific application of interest. 

This tutorial will present an innovative POCT device which includes an optical probe based on the so-called surface plasmon resonance (SPR) phenomenon and plastic optical fibers (POFs) to develop groundbreaking solutions to be used in several biochemical sensing scenarios.  

In particular, by monitoring the change in resonance wavelength due to the analyte/receptor binding, the developed device has the capability to automatically acquire the data and send it to an external server for further processing. 

The POCT device versatility has been demonstrated by several applications ranging from environmental monitoring to healthcare and industrial applications. 

Keywords: Optical fiber sensors; optical biosensors; surface plasmon resonance (SPR); plastic optical fibers (POFs); point-of-care tests (POCTs) 

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