Screen-printed electrodes as “lab-on-a-chip” monitoring tools for antioxidant capacity of foods

Abstract

The necessity for fast, accessible and reliable information in a complex-connected world generated in the last 40 years an impressive development of the "lab-on-a-chip" type technology based on miniaturized devices able to integrate in a single chip, one or several analyses. The areas of application for such type of devices are various, ranging from clinical diagnostic to evaluations of food substrates or environmental monitoring. The capabilities of "lab-on-a-chip" can be extended beyond the quasi-limited classical monitoring, thus providing valuable chemical and biological information that can be digitized by using centralized/decentralized facilities for data storage, remotely, thus being more easily available to users. The "lab-ona- chip" materials and manufacturing technologies present net advantages (low cost, high parallelization, ease of use and compactness, reduction of human error, faster response time and diagnosis, low volume samples) but also and some limitations (miniaturization increases the signal-to-noise ratio so that most "lab-on-a-chip" technologies are not yet ready for industrialization, the mandatory external control system expands the final size and costs, the widespread accessibility can generate erroneous fears for an untrained public).