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

Abstract

Abstract-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 Pointof-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 impedancebased 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.

Smartphone-based biosensing platform evolution: Implementation of electrochemical analysis capabilities

“…This materializes in our case with the possibility to specify LoC operations (i.e. functions) at the high-abstraction mobile-software layer, for varied LoC architectures [4]. An iOS Application Programming Interface (API) gives the LoC application designer access to a set of customizable tasks (figure 1).…”

“…Many examples already illustrate possible benefits of interfacing LoCs to smartphones, leveraging the computational power, peripherals and usability of the latter to avoid the need for developing complex instruments or controllers [3]. Nevertheless, as we argued in a recent publication, the predictable sporadic nature of home-based IVMD testing questions the justifiability of developing application-specific or non-evolvable systems [4]. So does the fast-pace evolution of the technologies underlying LoC systems (e.g.…”

“…biosensing, microfluidics). We therefore advocate design for evolvability in smartphone/LoC systems and recently introduced the first generation of a platform implemented in that perspective [4]. We follow up on these initial results and present in this work how we evolved our initial design to allow the execution of electrochemical measurements.…”

Model-Based Evaluation of System Scalability: Bandwidth Analysis for Smartphone-Based Biosensing Applications

“…We consider a smartphone-based platform, introduced in [3] and further elaborated upon in [4]. In an attempt to address the challenges specific to changing contexts and requirements discussed by Fricke et al [5], the system was designed so as to favour system evolution.…”

“…In recent work, we argued that the field of Point-of-Care in-vitro medical diagnostics presented several of the characteristics that justify design for evolvability, a key constituent of which is scalability [3]. We present, in this paper, a modelbased methodology for evaluating parametric scalability in complex systems.…”