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Sensor integration into microfluidic systems: trends and challenges
Summary
This review covers recent advances in integrating sensors into tiny microfluidic devices for detecting biological targets like pathogens and protein markers. While not directly about microplastics, the sensor technologies described here are increasingly being adapted to detect and measure micro and nanoplastic particles in water and biological samples. Better sensing tools are essential for understanding how much microplastic exposure humans actually face in their daily lives.
The combination of sensors and microfluidics has become a promising approach for detecting a wide variety of targets relevant in biotechnology. Thanks to recent advances in the manufacturing of microfluidic systems, microfluidics can be manufactured faster, cheaper, and more accurately than ever before. These advances make microfluidic systems very appealing as a basis for constructing sensor systems, and microfluidic devices have been adapted to house (bio)sensors for various applications (e.g. protein biomarker detection, cell culture oxygen control, and pathogen detection). This review article highlights several successfully integrated microfluidic sensor systems, with a focus on work that has been published within the last two years. Different sensor integration methods are discussed, and the latest trends in wearable- and smartphone-based sensors are described.