Optical waveguide based surface plasmon resonance sensor system for smartphones

An optical waveguide based surface plasmon resonance (SPR) sensor system for smartphones is presented which in the future could be applied for personal health monitoring or environmental sensing. For operation of the sensor system only the LED and the camera at the back side of a smartphone are required. Thus, future implementations of the reported sensor system could be integrated in the cover of a smartphone or used as low-cost, disposable diagnostic platform. In a proof of principle experiment, the performance of a sensor system based on a 400 μm plastic cladded silica glass fibre and an easy-to-implement silver coating technique was successfully evaluated by using different volume concentrations of glycerol solutions and a sensitivity of 5.96*10-4 refractive index units (RIU)/pixel for refractive index values between 1.33 and 1.36 was obtained. In the talk we present our latest work towards higher sensitivity and functionalization of the system for label-free biosensing applications.