Smartphone as a photometric sensor for detection of fluoride content in drinking water

Presence of chemical contaminant such as fluoride is a major concern for human health due to the risk of serious health issues such as dental and skeletal fluororis. People from many parts of India even in our North-East are suffering from serious health hazards by unknowingly drinking fluoride content water. Since, this chemicals does not create any physical coloration to water, no efforts has been made for removal. Detection of such chemicals required costly lab-confined spectrophotometer which costs in lakhs. Although visual detection of such chemicals is possible with colorimteric test kits but the problem is that it can't exactly quantify the exact amount of the fluoride content. For exact quantification we need costly laboratory grade tools and requires people with scientific expertise.

As mentioned in the previous posts smartphone finds its applicability in many of the scientific ventures. We have recently demonstrated in a peer reviewed journal (click for more information)the use of smartphone as a photometric sensor for in-field detection of chemical contaminants in drinking water. For example we have considered detection of fluoride in water. The same sensor can be used for all absorption based detection methods. We have used the ambient light sensor of the phone as a light intensity detector and developed the required android app using MIT App inventor cloud based software for rapid computation within the phone.

Still both scientific and computational optimization requires which will be done in the due course of time. the developed sensor can find its usability as a ultra low cost photometer in monitoring water quality parameters in remote and resource poor regions of our country.