Themed collection Microfluidics for Wearable and Implantable Technologies

This review offers a practical guide to designing microfluidic systems for wearable biosensors, covering materials, fabrication, and fluid handling, with emphasis on challenges of wearable formats such as flexibility and biocompatibility.

This review outlines a system-level framework for active implantable drug delivery systems (AIDDSs), analyzing how design choices in actuation, powering, and communication affect clinical translation and the development of scalable devices.

This work reviews recent progress in wearable biosensors for disease diagnostics, highlighting interactions between biomarker biological characteristics, sensing strategies, and microfluidic methods in development of wearable biosensing platforms.

The integration of microneedles (MNs) with microfluidics, microelectronics, or artificial intelligence is applied to MN-based sampling devices, biosensors and electrodes, enabling intelligent health monitoring and personalized disease management.

This review discusses recent progress in materials, fabrication methods, and sensing mechanisms for microcavity-assisted microfluidic physical sensors, and discusses future directions toward broader adoption and scalable deployment.

This review explores microfluidic thermal management mechanisms, materials, and designs. It highlights applications in device-level cooling, personal thermoregulation, and human–machine interfaces, while outlining challenges and future prospects.

AI-driven wearable microfluidic systems integrating mechanomedicine principles offer transformative potential for infection diagnosis and therapeutic control. They can shift infectious disease management toward prevention and personalized care.

We provide a comprehensive review of state-of-the-art paper-based microfluidic devices for wearable soft bioelectronics, emphasizing innovative materials and device designs that enable on-skin biofluid sampling, biosensing, and disease diagnostics.

Recent advances in wearable and implantable microfluidics enable real-time sensing, drug delivery, and closed-loop therapy, with emerging trends in stretchability, multimodal integration, and AI-driven data processing.

This review highlights how microfluidic technologies advance wearable and implantable biomedical devices for real-time health monitoring and targeted therapy, while addressing materials, fabrication, applications, and clinical translation challenges.

Liquid transport is an essential functionality in microfluidic operation. This review summarizes emerging strategies for liquid management in bioelectronics, with a focus on system-level integration and applications.

This review highlights advances in capillary microfluidic wearables enabling power-free, continuous biofluid monitoring and biosensing, with emphasis on fluidic architectures, analyte detection, and pathways for clinical translation.

Microneedle-based platform enables passive, zero-power extraction of interstitial fluid from skin models, demonstrating rapid sampling kinetics, efficient uptake, and accurate quantitative recovery of cortisol for wearable diagnostic applications.

A novel microneedle sensor designed for rapid, non-invasive monitoring of intestinal barrier health.

A durable, superhydrophilic intraoral microfluidic retainer uses capillary-driven flow to continuously deliver saliva across an integrated electrochemical sensor for noninvasive glucose tracking.

The human sweating rate reflects body hydration status and holds intrinsic significance for monitoring physiological health.

A multifunctional microfluidic bioelectronic suture enables real-time wound monitoring and electrical stimulation to accelerate healing.

Hydrophilic PDMS–PEG soft wearable microfluidics are developed via one-pot soft lithography, which doubles the sweat collection volume and advances noninvasive, reliable sampling for clinical analysis.

Herein, we report the first electrochemical microfluidic thread/paper-based analytical device (μTPAD) by harnessing the synergistic combination of embroidery as a manufacturing technique and paper-based technology.

Schematic of the drug release (a) from MN patches by a general surface coating method and (b) from the MN patch with a hole combined with a microfluidic chip.

A wearable microfluidic device captures sweat on the dorsal distal phalanges of the fingers during everyday activity.

A stretchable liquid diode enables tuneable, passive, and unidirectional flow by coupling surface wettability modulation with mechanical stretching. This approach enables programmable liquid routing, for wearable microfluidic applications.

A wearable microfluidic device with magneto-active bistable valves enables energy-efficient, on-demand, and contamination-free sweat collection with high spatial and temporal resolution.

A flexible microchannel-confined droplet-based electricity generator (MC-DEG) is proposed, enabling biomechanical energy conversion and physiological signal monitoring.

Out-of-surface microchannels (OSMiCs) are arched, monolithic PDMS structures that shrink under tensile strain, directly converting skin stretching into fluid pressure and addressing a critical challenge in wearable microfluidics.

A multi-channel wearable sensing patch based on gate-all-around field-effect transistors that enables comprehensive health monitoring.

A novel wearable microfluidic device designed for dual-mode sweat sampling, addressing the limitations in real-time and on-demand modes operation, with applications in chronic disease management, athletic performance optimization, and early-stage condition detection.

Wearable microneedle-paper device enables simultaneous, minimally invasive detection of cortisol and dopamine in interstitial fluid via colorimetric distance-based sensing for simple, low-cost, equipment-free stress monitoring.

Ketone bodies are key products of fat metabolism, primarily consisting of acetoacetate (AcAc), β-hydroxybutyrate (BHB), and acetone (acetone).

Quantitative analysis of amino acid loss in sweat during exercise using a smartphone-enabled, microfluidic platform.