BACKGROUND Patient Data Management Systems (PDMS) support clinical documentation at the bedside and have demonstrated effects on completeness of patient charting and the time spent on documentation. These systems are costly and raise the question if such a major investment pays off. We tried to answer the following questions: How do costs and revenues of an intensive care unit develop before an...

Poly(dimethylsiloxane) (PDMS) has become the material of choice for fabricating microfluidic channels for lab-on-a-chip applications. Key challenges that limit the use of PDMS in microfluidic applications are its hydrophobic nature, and the difficulty in obtaining stable surface modifications. Although a number of approaches exist to render PDMS hydrophilic, they suffer from reversion to hydrop...

This paper outlines a straightforward, fast, and low-cost method to fabricate polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) chips. Termed sandwich bonding (SWB), this method requires only a laboratory oven. Initially, SWB relies on the reversible bonding of a coverslip over PDMS channels. The coverslip is smaller than the substrate, leaving a border around the substrate exposed. Subsequently, a liquid composed o...

Polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) has been extensively exploited to study stem cell physiology in the field of mechanobiology and microfluidic chips due to their transparency, low cost and ease of fabrication. However, its intrinsic high hydrophobicity renders a surface incompatible for prolonged cell adhesion and proliferation. Plasma-treated or protein-coated PDMS shows some improvement but these s...

Poly(dimethyl siloxane) (PDMS) was surface-polymerized with poly(ethylene glycol)methacrylate (PEGMA) by surface-initiated atom transfer radical polymerization (SI-ATRP) in aqueous media at room temperature. Modification of the PDMS surface followed a three-step procedure: (i) PDMS surface hydroxylation by UV/ozone exposure, immediately followed by (ii) covalent attachment of the initiator, 1-t...

Carbon nano tube (CNT) yarn is an axially aligned CNT assembly. It has great potential many applications. In this study, the mechanical and electrical properties of the aerogel-spun CNT yarns and CNT/Polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) composite yarns were investigated. The CNT/PDMS yarn was fabricated by droplet infiltration of PDMS solution into the aerogel-spun CNT yarn. The mechanical properties of...

Polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) has numerous desirable properties for fabricating microfluidic devices, including optical transparency, flexibility, biocompatibility, and fabrication by casting; however, partitioning of small hydrophobic molecules into the bulk of PDMS hinders industrial acceptance of PDMS microfluidic devices for chemical processing and drug development applications. Here we descr...

This paper presents a method for precision patterning of polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) membranes based on parylene C lift-off. The process permits the construction of PDMS membranes either with a highly flat, uniform top surface or with a controlled curvature. Effects of varying processing parameters on the geometrical characteristics of the PDMS membranes are described. The paper also demonstrat...

A thermo-responsive PNIPAAm-grafted-PDMS (PNIPAAm-g-PDMS) surface was used for cell culture. Cos7 cells could adhere to the PNIPAAm-g-PDMS surface and proliferated therein at 37 C. The cultured cells could detach from the surface at room temperature without trypsin digestion. The viability of cells harvested from the PNIPAAm-g-PDMS surface via lowering temperature was higher than that of cells ...

Coating of polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) surface with a traditional Chinese herb extract chlorogenic acid (CA) solves the contemporary problem of sterilization of PDMS surface. The E. coli grows slower and has a higher death rate on the CA-coated PDMS surfaces. A smoother morphology of these E. coli cell wall is observed by atomic force microscopy (AFM). Unlike the reported mechanism, where CA in...