Point-of-care (POC) platforms are rapidly emerging as a portable and inexpensive alternative to the traditional laboratory based analytical methods especially for diagnostic applications in resource limited areas. These platforms are easy to deploy with less or no professional training and offers quicker results at an affordable cost, hence are critical for various global healthcare programs especially in cases where rapid medical decisions are needed.

This PhD project aims to develop next generation POC devices incorporating a sample concentrator and a sensing element. We have recently developed a dielectrophoretic (DEP) device to concentrate analyte molecules from very dilute solutions to a region of interest making it viable to detect ultra-diluted (pM-fM) analytes without the need of any sample pre-concentration or amplification. Additionally, DEP has been widely demonstrated to permit the selective concentration of analytes of interest by tuning the parameters and device architecture. We aim to integrate this technology to the POC devices to effectively enable reagent-free analyte concentration for simplified high-throughput analysis.