The Internet of Microfluidic Things: Perspectives on System Architecture and Design Challenges

The integration of microfluidics and biosensor technology is transforming microbiology research by providing new capabilities for clinical diagnostics, cancer research, and pharmacology studies. This integration enables new approaches for biochemistry automation and cyber-physical adaptation. Similarly, recent years have witnessed the rapid growth of the Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm, where different types of real-world elements such as wearable sensors are connected and allowed to autonomously interact with each other. Combining the advances of both cyber-physical microfluidics and IoT domains can generate new opportunities for knowledge fusion by transforming distributed local microfluidic elements into a global network of coordinated microfluidic systems. This paper aims to streamline this transformation and it presents a research vision for enabling the Internet of Microfluidic Things (IoMT). To leverage advances in connected Microfluidic Things, we highlight new perspectives on system architecture, and describe technical challenges related to design automation, temporal flexibility, security, and service assignment. This vision is supported by case studies from cancer research and pharmacology studies to explain the significance of the proposed framework.