Review of patents for microneedle application devices allowing fluid injections through the skin.

Microneedles have been developed in the past few years as a new means of transdermal drug delivery. They indeed present many advantages compared to injections using hypodermic needles (reduced risk of contamination and epidermic reactions), but mostly bring comfort and compliance to patients. Microneedles may be plain, opening pathways for medications to dissolve into the skin, or hollow, allowing fluid to actually enter the dermis or the hypodermis.

Hollow polymer microneedles array resistance and insertion tests.

Microneedles are developed in order to become the transdermal administration method of the future. They however still face numerous challenges. This paper addresses the challenge to effectively insert the microneedle arrays into membranes.

Position measurement/tracking comparison of the instrumentation in a droplet-actuated-robotic platform.

This paper reports our work on developing a surface tension actuated micro-robotic platform supported by three bubbles (liquid environment) or droplets (gaseous environment). The actuation principle relies on the force developed by surface tension below a millimeter, which benefits from scaling laws, and is used to actuate this new type of compliant robot. By separately controlling the pressure inside each bubble, three degrees of freedom can be actuated.