A Smart Mobile Lab-on-Chip-Based Medical Diagnostics System Architecture Designed For Evolvability

Unprecedented knowledge levels in life sciences along with technological advances in micro- and nanotechnologies and microfluidics have recently conditioned the advent of Lab-on-Chip (LoC) devices for In-Vitro Medical Testing (IVMT). Combined with smart-mobile technologies, LoCs are pervasively giving rise to opportunities to better diagnose disease, predict and monitor personalised treatment efficacy, or provide healthcare decision-making support at the Point-of-Care (PoC).

Although made increasingly available to the consumer market, the adoption of LoC-based PoC In-Vitro Medical Testing (IVMT) systems is still in its infancy. This attrition partly pertains to the intricacy of designing and developing complex systems, destined to be used sporadically, in a fast-pace evolving technological paradigm.

System evolvability is therefore key in the design process and constitutes the main motivation for this work. We introduce a smart-mobile and LoC-based system architecture designed for evolvability. By propagating LoC programmability, instrumentation, and control tools to the highlevel abstraction smart-mobile software layer, our architecture facilitates the realisation of new use-cases and the accommodation for incremental LoC-technology developments.

We demonstrate these features with an implementation allowing the interfacing of LoCs embedding current- or impedance-based biosensors such as Silicon Nanowire Field Effect Transistors (SiNW-FETs) or electrochemical transducers. Structural modifications of these LoCs or changes in their specific operation may be addressed by the sole reengineering of the mobilesoftware layer, minimising system upgrade development and validation costs and efforts.