Telemedicine for insulin detection based on microfluidic system

This paper reports a microfluidic-based telemedicine system for the determination of insulin, an important indicator for clinical diagnosis of diabetes. The telemedicine system conveys the assay results digitally to established healthcare facilities, where trained medical professionals can directly assist the detection process and provide diagnosis through the Internet. The integrated polydimethysiloxane (PDMS) microfluidic system consists of one pneumatic micropump and one micromixer on a single chip for insulin detection. The detection protocol is based on magnetic microbeads based double-antibody sandwich chemiluminescent immunoassay. The peak value of the luminous intensity is proportional to the insulin concentration of the testing sample. The sensitivity curves of the microfluidic system have been quantified, and the insulin detection limit is determined to be about 10^-11 M. The combination of PDMS microfluidic devices and a communication strategy offers new opportunities for diabetes care and screening, especially in rural areas, and the proposed system can be an extremely useful Point-of-Care diagnostic tool with off-site expert assistance.