Point of care creatinine measurement for diagnosis of renal disease using a disposable microchip

Lab-on-chip technology for chronic disease diagnosis

Various types of chronic diseases (CD) are the leading causes of disability and death worldwide. While those diseases are chronic in nature, accurate and timely clinical decision making is critically required. Current diagnosis procedures are often lengthy and costly, which present a major bottleneck for effective CD healthcare. Rapid, reliable and low-cost diagnostic tools at point-of-care (PoC) are therefore on high demand. Owing to miniaturization, lab-on-chip (LoC) technology has high potential to enable improved biomedical applications in terms of low-cost, high-throughput, ease-of-operation and analysis. In this direction, research toward developing new LoC-based PoC systems for CD diagnosis is fast growing into an emerging area. Some studies in this area began to incorporate digital and mobile technologies. Here we review the recent developments of this area with the focus on chronic respiratory diseases (CRD), diabetes, and chronic kidney diseases (CKD). We conclude by discussing the challenges, opportunities and future perspectives of this field.

Lab-on-a-Chip: Frontier Science in the Classroom

Lab-on-a-chip technology is brought into the classroom through development of a lesson series with hands-on practicals. Students can discover the principles of microfluidics with different practicals covering laminar flow, micromixing, and droplet generation, as well as trapping and counting beads. A quite affordable novel production technique using scissor-cut and laser-cut lamination sheets is presented, which provides good insight into how scientific lab-on-a-chip devices are produced. In this way high school students can now produce lab-on-a-chip devices using lamination sheets and their own lab-on-a-chip design. We begin with a review of previous reports on the use of lab-on-a-chip technology in classrooms, followed by an overview of the practicals and projects we have developed with student safety in mind. We conclude with an educational scenario and some initial promising results for student learning outcomes.