Emerging Technology Trends in Point-of-Care Diagnostics

Point-of-care testing has been a topic of particular interest throughout the history of modern medicine. In recent years, however, the acceleration and growing momentum of fields such as genetics, biochemistry, nanotechnology and computer science have caused the pace of point-of-care research to accelerate. This has driven a shift in focus from the development of complementary clinical monitoring devices to complete replacements for aspects of the traditional laboratory based diagnostic suite. Gradually, trends have begun to emerge that appear to present a clear path forward to the desired end-goal of complete, realtime point-of-care diagnostic capability. As such, this brief review is intended to serve as a primer to introduce researchers to the current state of the art in point-of-care diagnostics and the areas of research that are generally agreed and accepted to be likely key components of future diagnostic devices.