Anti-Counterfeit Technologies for Microfluidic “Lab-on-a-Disc” Systems

Abstract

Non-genuine medical products, including diagnostic devices, have become a lucrative business for fraudsters, causing significant damage to revenues and reputation of companies, as well as posing a significant risk to the health of people and societies. Along a “digital twin” representing centrifugal microfluidic flow control on exemplary “Lab-on-a-Disc” (LoaD) systems, a novel, two-pronged strategy to safeguard miniaturized point-of-care devices by means of secret features and manufacturing challenges is outlined; such “hardware encryption” is flexibly programmed for each chip during production, and deciphered from a secure, local or online database at the time of use. This way, unlicensed copying may be efficiently deterred by an unfavourable economy-of-scale, even in absence of legal prosecution.

Digital Twin: An Oracle for Efficient Crowdsourcing of Research & Technology Development through Blockchain

“…Previous work has outlined how to leverage the benefits of blockchain-based community approaches for science & RTD [58][59][60][61][62][63] in a more general context. This paper exemplifies the digital twin concept for the case of centrifugal microfluidic flow control, which has been experimentally demonstrated and elaborated in much more technical detail elsewhere [64][65][66][67][68][69].…”

“…In preceding publications, the model for CP-DF siphon valving has already been applied for design optimization of centrifugal microfluidic LoaD systems towards fluidic larger-scale integration [64], to enhance system-level reliability of multiplexed centrifugo-pneumatic flow control [65], derived anticounterfeit technologies [66], and on-board reagent storage and release by solvent-selective, rotationally opened membranes [67].…”

On-Board Reagent Storage and Release by Solvent-Selective, Rotationally Opened Membranes – A Digital Twin Approach

“…This scaling with the atmospheric pressure 𝑝𝑝 0 only affects the overall magnitude of Δ𝑝𝑝 𝑉𝑉 , but not the direction and ratio of the pneumatic pressures. We therefore refer to previous work on centrifugo-pneumatic valving where the impact and possible compensation of variation in the atmospheric pressure by weather, and particularly local altitude, have been examined in more detail [27,98,103,105].…”

“…This paper focuses on a novel type of rotationally actuated valve; during storage of an aqueous reagent, a (water) dissolvable film (DF) presents a diffusion barrier which is initially protected by an oleophilic, ancillary liquid having a certain, specific density [50,75,96,[98][99][100]. Upon spinning, a centrifugo-hydrostatic equilibrium is reached in which the interface between the two immiscible liquids contacts and thus dissolves the DF.…”

On-board reagent storage and release by solvent-selective, rotationally opened membranes: a digital twin approach

“…This paper focuses on a novel type of rotationally actuated valve; during storage of an aqueous reagent, a (water) dissolvable film (DF) presents a diffusion barrier which is initially protected by an oleophilic, ancillary liquid having a certain, specific density (Gaughran et al 2016;Mishra et al 2015Mishra et al , 2017Mishra et al , 2020Ducrée 2021d;Lu et al 2020). Upon spinning, a centrifugo-hydrostatic equilibrium is reached, in which the interface between the two immiscible liquids contacts and thus dissolves the DF.…”