On-demand, remote and lossless manipulation of biofluid droplets

The recent global outbreaks of epidemics and pandemics have shown us that we are severely under-prepared to cope with infectious agents. Exposure to infectious agents present in biofluids ( e.g. , blood, saliva, urine etc. ) poses a severe risk to clinical laboratory personnel and healthcare workers...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Materials horizons 2022-10, Vol.9 (11), p.2863-2871
Main Authors: Wang, Wei, Sun, Jiefeng, Vallabhuneni, Sravanthi, Pawlowski, Benjamin, Vahabi, Hamed, Nellenbach, Kimberly, Brown, Ashley C, Scholle, Frank, Zhao, Jianguo, Kota, Arun K
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Actuators
Developing countries
Disease Outbreaks
Droplets
Exposure
Health Personnel
Humans
Laboratories
LDCs
Manipulators
Pandemics - prevention & control
Point-of-Care Systems
Saliva
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:The recent global outbreaks of epidemics and pandemics have shown us that we are severely under-prepared to cope with infectious agents. Exposure to infectious agents present in biofluids ( e.g. , blood, saliva, urine etc. ) poses a severe risk to clinical laboratory personnel and healthcare workers, resulting in hundreds of millions of hospital-acquired and laboratory-acquired infections annually. Novel technologies that can minimize human exposure through remote and automated handling of infectious biofluids will mitigate such risk. In this work, we present biofluid manipulators, which allow on-demand, remote and lossless manipulation of virtually any liquid droplet. Our manipulators are designed by integrating thermo-responsive soft actuators with superomniphobic surfaces. Utilizing our manipulators, we demonstrate on-demand, remote and lossless manipulation of biofluid droplets. We envision that our biofluid manipulators will not only reduce manual operations and minimize exposure to infectious agents, but also pave the way for developing inexpensive, simple and portable robotic systems, which can allow point-of-care operations, particularly in developing nations. To minimize exposure of healthcare workers and clinical laboratory personnel to infectious liquids, we designed biofluid manipulators for on-demand handling of liquid droplets, in-plane or out-of-plane, in a remote and lossless manner.
ISSN:2051-6347
2051-6355
2051-6355
DOI:10.1039/d2mh00695b