Design, Development, and Validation of an End-User Photo-Thermal Sensing Platform for Rapid Detection and Quantification of Analytes in Fluidic Samples

The ability to detect the presence of specific analytes and quantify their titers in fluidic samples is essential in many industries, spanning from food industries to law enforcement to healthcare and beyond. The existing technologies used for this purpose require the use of specialty equipment by trained professionals in a laboratory setting to function (e.g., mass spectrometry or ELISA) which greatly increases the cost and time taken to receive actionable results. Portable and inexpensive tests exist – Lateral Flow Immunoassays – however these tests are only qualitative and frequently have an inferior limit of detection. To date, several sensing devices have been designed to interrogate these LFIAs and decrease their limit of detection, however, these devices are often prohibitively expensive. This thesis outlines attempts to design and validate a sensing platform which could inexpensively enhance the limit of detection of LFIAs.The prototype is then validated through both lab-based and human experiments.