Mobile Application for Determining the Concentration of Sulfonamides in Water Using Digital Image Colorimetry

摘要

Antibiotics are widely applied for the treatment of humans and animals, being the Sulfonamides a special group. The presence of antibiotics in the aquatic environment causes the development antibiotic-resistant bacteria, which is related to the emerging of untreatable infectious diseases. One of the most common methods for determine it consists in high-performance liquid chromatography coupled with mass spectrom-etrym, which is not suitable for an in situ analysis strategy.One important property of sulfonamides is how the compound reacts when added the colorimetric reagent p-dimethylaminocinnamaldehyde, opening the possibility of using colorimetry to measure the concentration. To allow an analysis on the field, the solution needs to be fully mobile and practical. In this context, we recently developed a new screening method based on a computational application running over a picture of the sample; however, despite this approach improving the analysis process when compared to traditional methods, it is still not fully mobile.Smartphones' computational capabilities are increasing and more powerful than many laptops of older generations. Taking this into account, we developed a mobile analysis application that leverages the computing power and ease of use of a smartphone. The acquired picture will pass through a color correction algorithm to normalize the capture considering the environmental lighting. When the algorithm finishes processing the image, the app will return the estimated concentration of the sample. This approach enables in situ analysis, without requiring an Internet connection nor specific analysis equipment, and the ability to have a rather precise guess of the level of contamination of any water.