Lens turns smartphone into a microscope

Wei-Chuan Shih, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at UH, said in a statement that the lens can work as a microscope, and the cost and ease of using it – it attaches directly to a smartphone camera lens, without the use of any additional device – make it ideal for use with younger students in the classroom.

It also could have clinical applications, allowing small or isolated clinics to share images with specialists located elsewhere, he said.

In a paper published in the Journal of Biomedical Optics, Shih and three graduate students describe how they produced the lenses and examine the image quality. Yu-Lung Sung, a doctoral candidate, served as first author; others involved in the study include Jenn Jeang, and Chia-Hsiung Lee, a former graduate student at UH now working in the technology industry in Taiwan.

The lens is made of polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS), a viscous polymer dropped precisely on a preheated surface to cure. Lens curvature depends on how long and at what temperature the PDMS is heated, Sung said. The resulting lenses are flexible, similar to a soft contact lens, although they are thicker and slightly smaller.