34719Lab Quality Portable MicroscopeClosedCollaborative R&DInnovate UKioLight's market data shows that there is a large addressable market for a lab quality portable microscope for professional field science. Vets, biologists, botanists, agronomists, mycologists, farmers and other professional microscope users repeatedly tell us that they love the portability, image quality and ease of use of the existing ioLight microscope. They also like ioLight's images displayed live on a mobile phone, tablet or computer, which makes them easy to share or paste into reports. However, they need 3 additional features: 1. Selectable optical magnification to give higher resolution and wider field of view 2. Dark-field, and oblique illumination for imaging transparent objects, such as cells and sperm 3. A translation stage for methodical scans of slides to count eggs, sperm and cells The purpose of this project is to develop such a lab quality portable microscope without compromising the portability and ease of use of the existing product. The project will culminate with testing prototype microscopes with 20 potential customers, and produce design recommendations for a product that will subsequently be built and sold by ioLight. This project is innovative because ioLight has realised that by using imaging technology that is now available at low cost from the mobile phone industry, it is possible to build a lab quality portable microscope to meet the needs of the professional scientist. This market is largely unserved. Current offerings are either large, heavy conventional lab microscopes in a flight case, which are impractical, or handheld digital microscopes which have insufficient magnification. Further technical innovation is adapting the illuminator to provide switchable bright field, dark field and other illumination options. Innovative methods will be developed to provide 3 optical magnifications without using 3 entirely different lens systems in each microscope. The project will cost £138,568 and last 16 months.