Wearable nucleic acid testing platform - A perspective on rapid self-diagnosis and surveillance of infectious diseases

Wearable biosensors (WB) are currently attracting considerable interest for rapid detection and monitoring of biomarkers including metabolites, protein, and pathogen in bodily fluids (e.g., sweat, saliva, tears, and interstitial fluid). Another branch of WB termed wearable nucleic acid testing (NAT) is blossoming thanks to the development of microfluidic technology and isothermal nucleic acid amplification technique (iNAAT); however, there are only few reports on this. The wearable NAT is an emerging field of point-of-care (POC) diagnostics, and holds the promise for time-saving self-diagnosis, and evidence-based surveillance of infectious diseases in remote or low-resource settings. The use of wearable NAT can also be advanced to include molecular diagnosis, the identification of cancer biomarkers, genetic abnormalities, and other aspects. The wearable NAT provides the potential for evidence-based surveillance of infectious diseases when combined with internet connectivity and App software. To make the wearable NAT accessible to the end users, however, improvements must be made to the fabrication, cost, speed, sensitivity, specificity, sampling, iNAAT, analyzer, and a few other features. So, in this paper, we looked at the wearable NAT's most recent development, identified its difficulties, and defined its potential for managing infectious diseases quickly in the future. This is the wearable NAT review's first effort. We expect that this article will provide the concise resources needed to develop and deploy an efficient wearable NAT system.