On a Chip

Biological or biomedical microelectromechanical systems (BioMEMS) are poised to have a significant impact on clinical and biomedical applications. These devices-also termed lab-on-chip or point-of-care (POC) sensors-rep- resent a significant opportunity in various patient-centric settings, including at home, at the doctor's office, in ambulances on the way to the hospital, in emergency rooms (ERs), at the hospital bedside, in rural and global health settings, and in clinical or commercial diagnostic laboratories. The potential impact of these technologies on the early diagnosis and management of disease can be very high for sensing and reporting on parameters ranging from physiological to biomolecular. As health-care delivery and management be- come increasingly personalized and individualized and as genomic, proteomic, and metabolic technologies unravel the human genetic and epigenetic dispositions to disease, detection of multiple markers (at any of the Omics scale) at an individualized level to assess the state of health and disease will become even more important.