Chromacare Labs set out to make ferritin testing possible in ten minutes at a kitchen table. Its lateral-flow assay develops a coloured line from a single drop of blood, but that line needs a reliable way to become a number. 247 Labs architected, designed and developed the Chromacare App for iOS and Android. The app guides each step of the test, captures the developed cassette under controlled settings, calibrates the image against a printed reference card and returns a quantitative ferritin measurement.

Consumer cameras automatically adjust exposure and white balance, so identical cassettes can look different under different phones and lighting. On a colourimetric assay, that variation can resemble a difference in a patient’s blood. Chromacare needed a reader that could control capture, normalize each image and extract a defensible signal without dedicated hardware. The product also had to follow a regulated test protocol, including timing gates, guided instructions, clear failure states and a usable results history.

When the test timer completes, the app takes over capture with fixed shutter speed and ISO, explicit focus and white-balance handling, and a maximum-fidelity RAW image. Fiducial markers on the printed card let the pipeline locate greyscale and colour swatches, normalize the frame and isolate the test window. It samples the control and test lines against their local backgrounds, calculates a corrected T/C ratio, and reports replicate variation. Invalid frames produce clear instructions instead of a misleading result.