Cover Story：Current diffuse optical tomography (DOT) systems often adopt premium photo detectors and amplifiers, thus leading to a high cost and low performance-to-price ratio to the system. The aim of this work is to investigate the use of novel techniques to reduce the cost of system, increase the imaging depth and develop a new DOT system for practical human brain imaging. In this paper, low-cost photo detectors and a self-developed photodiode pre-amplifier were employed. Comparing to the previous system of our laboratory, the whole cost of the new system was cut by more than 40% . Next, we designed a wearable fiber-free brain computer interface (BCI) which is flexible and can fit well with subjects featuring different shapes. A handheld 3D laser scanner was initially used to accurately acquire the shape of subjects and the locations of sources and detectors in this work. Finally, the imaging depth of targets was up to 35 mm of the new system in human head-shaped phantom experiments performed with the integrated application of techniques and instruments as mentioned above. This validated result demonstrates that our new system has gained the ability for function real human brain imaging.