An inexpensive portable potentiostat with wireless communication capabilities : design, fabrication and testing

Abstract

Potentiostats have been an integral part of all electrochemistry laboratories since the early 1940s but due to their cost, bulky nature and the need for a companion computer they have been restricted from being used for real world applications and trapped inside labs. With the aim to make potentiostats truly portable by removing them from their companion computer and easy to use, we have come up with a complete system that can be controlled wirelessly via Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) using a mobile phone app called Blynk. This app helps calculate glucose concentration of a solution accurately and display. It provides control over input parameter of the chronoamperometric technique which is used for finding glucose and has a real-time graph visualization of the experimental data gathered. Potentially in the future with the help of this system diabetes patients can keep a check on their glucose level with all the information needed on their figure tips with the help of the smart phone. The performance of the potentiostat has been verified during the experiments and the accuracy has been determined to meet ISO standard. Future works will focus on reducing the size of the potentiostat so that the user can potentially wear it and be able to control all parameters of different electrochemical techniques such as Cyclic Voltametric etc.