Error recovery in digital microfluidics for personalized medicine

Due to its emergence as an efficient platform for point-of-care clinical diagnostics, design optimization of digital-microfluidic biochips (DMFBs) has received considerable attention in recent years. In particular, error recoverability is of key interest in medical applications due to the need for system reliability. Errors are likely during droplet manipulation due to defects, chip degradation, and the lack of precision inherent in biochemical experiments. We present an illustrative survey on recently proposed techniques for error recovery. The parameters of the error-recovery design space are shown and evaluated for these schemes. Next, we make use of these evaluations to describe how they can guide error recovery in DMFBs. Finally, an experimental case study is presented to demonstrate how an error-recovery scheme can be applied to real-life biochips.