Aspects of Point-of-Care Diagnostics for Personalized Health Wellness.

Advancements in analytical diagnostic systems for point-of-care (POC) application have gained considerable attention because of their rapid operation at the site required to manage severe diseases, even in a personalized manner. The POC diagnostic devices offer easy operation, fast analytical outcome, and affordable cost, which promote their advanced research and versatile adoptability. Keeping advantages in view, considerable efforts are being made to design and develop smart sensing components such as miniaturized transduction, interdigitated electrodes-based sensing chips, selective detection at low level, portable packaging, and sustainable durability to promote POC diagnostics according to the needs of patient care. Such effective diagnostics systems are in demand, which creates the challenge to make them more efficient in every aspect to generate a desired bio-informatic needed for better health access and management. Keeping advantages and scope in view, this mini review focuses on practical scenarios associated with miniaturized analytical diagnostic devices at POC application for targeted disease diagnostics smartly and efficiently. Moreover, advancements in technologies, such as smartphone-based operation, paper-based sensing assays, and lab-on-a-chip (LOC) which made POC more sensitive, informative, and suitable for major infectious disease diagnosis, are the main focus here. Besides, POC diagnostics based on automated patient sample integration with a sensing platform is continuously improving therapeutics interventions against specific infectious disease. This review also discussed challenges associated with state-of-the-art technology along with future research opportunities to design and develop next generation POC diagnostic systems needed to manage infectious diseases in a personalized manner.

Recent progress in nanomaterial-based sensing of airborne viral and bacterial pathogens.

Airborne pathogens are small microbes that can cause a multitude of diseases (e.g., the common cold, flu, asthma, anthrax, tuberculosis, botulism, and pneumonia). As pathogens are transmitted from infected hosts via a number of routes (e.g., aerosolization, sneezing, and coughing), there is a great demand to accurately monitor their presence and behavior. Despite such need, conventional detection methods (e.g., colony counting, immunoassays, and various molecular techniques) generally suffer from a number of demerits (e.g., complex, time-consuming, and labor-intensive nature). To help overcome such limitations, nanomaterial-based biosensors have evolved as alternative candidates to realize portable, rapid, facile, and direct on-site identification of target microbes. In this review, nano-biosensors developed for the detection of airborne pathogens are listed and discussed in reference to conventional options. The prospects for the development of advanced nano-biosensors with enhanced accuracy and portability are also discussed.