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Patterning of upconversion luminescent materials has been widely used for anti-counterfeit and security applications, where the preferred method should be easy, fast, multicolor, high-throughput and designable. However, conventional patterning methods are complex and inflexible. Here, we report a digital and flexible inkjet printing based approach for producing high-resolution and high-luminescence anti-counterfeit patterns. We successfully printed different multicolor luminescent patterns by inkjet printing of upconversion nanoparticles with controlled and uniform luminescence intensity through optimizing the inks and substrates. Combined with another downconversion luminescent material, we achieved two different patterns in the same area, which show up separately under excitation by different wavelength laser sources. The developed technology is promising to use one single substrate for carrying abundant information by printing multilayer patterns composed of luminescent materials with different excitation light sources.

Early and timely detection of disease biomarkers can prevent the spread of infectious diseases, and drastically decrease the death rate of people suffering from different diseases such as cancer and infectious diseases. Because conventional diagnostic methods have limited application in low-resource settings due to the use of bulky and expensive instrumentation, simple and low-cost point-of-care diagnostic devices for timely and early biomarker diagnosis, is the need of the hour, especially in rural areas and developing nations. The microfluidics technology possesses remarkable features for simple, low-cost, and rapid disease diagnosis. There have been significant advances in the development of microfluidic platforms for diseases biomarker detection. This article reviews recent advances in biomarker detection using cost-effective microfluidic devices for disease diagnosis, with the emphasis on infectious disease and cancer diagnosis in low-resource settings. This review first introduces different microfluidic platforms (e.g. polymer and paper-based microfluidics) used for disease diagnosis, with a brief description of their common fabrication techniques. Then, it highlights various detection strategies for disease biomarker detection using microfluidic platforms, including colorimetric, fluorescence, chemiluminescence, electrochemiluminescence (ECL), and electrochemical detection. Finally, it discusses the current limitations of microfluidics devices for disease biomarker detection and the future perspectives.

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