Over the past 20 years, rapid technological advancement in the field of microfluidics has produced a wide array of microfluidic point-of-care (POC) diagnostic devices for the healthcare industry. However, potential microfluidic applications in the field of nutrition, specifically to diagnose iron deficiency anemia (IDA) detection, remain scarce. Iron deficiency anemia is the most common form of anemia, which affects billions of people globally, especially the elderly, women, and children. This review comprehensively analyzes the current diagnosis technologies that address anemia-related IDA-POC microfluidic devices in the future. This review briefly highlights various microfluidics devices that have the potential to detect IDA and discusses some commercially available devices for blood plasma separation mechanisms. Reagent deposition and integration into microfluidic devices are also explored. Finally, we discuss the challenges of insights into potential portable microfluidic systems, especially for remote IDA detection.

This paper presents a simple and portable body iron reader to analyze the concentration of iron via colorimetric analysis. Through this approach, early diagnosis can be made for diseases such as iron deficiency anemia (IDA) and thalassemia. The uses of spectrophotometer to analyze a concentration of analyte in a sample can be reconsidered. Spectrophotometer nowadays is bulky and very expensive. The proposed portable reader can gives the user a result of concentration of analyte in a sample solution almost the same as the commercially available spectrophotometer. Through a comparison, the portable body iron reader managed to obtain a 0.9986 coefficient of determination value which has only 0.13% of error. Moreover, this device can works with a battery without the needs of power source. Â