We present a portable system for personalized
blood cell counting consisting of a microfluidic imped-
ance cytometer and portable analog readout electronics,
feeding into an analog-to-digital converter (ADC), and
being transmitted via Bluetooth to a user-accessible mo-
bile application. We fabricated a microfluidic impedance
cytometer with a novel portable analog readout. The novel
design of the analog readout, which consists of a lock-in-
amplifier followed by a high-pass filter stage for subtrac-
tion of drift and DC offset, and a post-subtraction high
gain stage, enables detection of particles and cells as
small as 1 μm in diameter, despite using a low-end 8-bit
ADC. The lock-in-amplifier and the ADC were set up to
receive and transmit data from a Bluetooth module. In
order to initiate the system, as well as to transmit all of
the data, a user friendly mobile application was devel-
oped, and a proof-of-concept trial was run on a blood
sample. Applications such as personalized health monitor-
ing require robust device operation and resilience to clog-
ging. It is desirable to avoid using channels comparable in
size to the particles being detected thus requiring high
levels of sensitivity. Despite using low-end off-the-shelf
hardware, our sensing platform was capable of detecting

• A portable battery powered microfluidic impedance cytometer with smartphone readout: towards personal health monitoring