Smartphones as Optical Detectors in Pharmaceutical Analysis: A Review

Abstract

The rise of smartphones and their diverse applications has altered the perspectives of many analysts and influenced several scientific branches. Smartphone-based chemical analysis is a promising field of intersection of analytical chemistry and mobile technology. Integrating smartphone technologies with analytical methods helps in building simple, affordable, and portable analytical devices, and this successfully complies with green analytical chemistry principles, as they make analytical laboratories more eco-friendly and less energy-consuming and make in-field analysis more feasible. Smartphones, as an integrated type of analytical tool, have several applications, including pharmaceutical analysis as they can play a valuable role in quality control testing for pharmaceutical products, preliminary screening testing and environmental monitoring to external pharmaceutical manufacturing conditions. Smartphone cameras and applications can be used to analyse drugs qualitatively or quantitatively in their pharmaceutical formulations by colorimetric determination. In this study, we aimed to review the applications of different analytical techniques in pharmaceutical analysis conducted in the previous two decades based on the use of smartphones as optical detectors. We classified these applications into two main approaches: the smartphone-based digital image analysis (SBDIA) method and the smartphone-based direct colorimetric analysis method. We believe that smartphone applications in pharmaceutical analysis will continue to develop and grow due to the continuous development of smartphone technologies. Nevertheless, a connection between analytical chemists and smart application producers is a demand to fine-tune these technologies according to analytical chemistry requirements.