Biological and biomedical applications of micro- and nanotechnology referred to as Biomedical or Biological Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems (BioMEMS) have found widespread use in a wide variety of applications such as diagnostics, therapeutics, sensing, detection, tissue engineering and hybrid bio/artificial devices. While research and development activity in this field stays intense, some applications have also been commercialized. Of course BioMEMS has become something of a misnomer as many of the latest technologies are increasingly being designed and developed based on nanoscale-level technologies, rather than just micro-scale technologies. While current devices are manufactured mostly on the micro-scale level, the functioning parts and the materials they operate on are at the nanoscale level.
Few of the applications include rapid detection of pathogens and microorganisms which is very critical to food safety, clinical diagnostics and related applications such as the detection of HIV/AIDS, for the MEMS based cochlear implant which can give hearing to deaf people through a wireless communication device and in the microchip retinal implant. MEMS accelerometer are widely applied to detect movement, heat flow, skin temperature, heart rate, etc. BioMEMS chips are used for early detection of bone disease, in the development of micro/nanoscale sensors and actuators with biological applications, as immunosensors, electrochemical sensors and are incorporated in various spectroscopic and separation tools in a microchip format. Remarkable progress has been made in the fabricate microscale and nanoscale devices for the detection and manipulation of biological cells and molecules, bio-MEMS sensor integrated with the wireless circuits, wireless label-free detection of disease-related C-reactive proteins (CRPs), in the microfluidic monitoring and control of intravenous delivery systems, as transistor that fuses carbon nanotubes (CNTs), polymers, and silicon into a bioMEMS-based capnography sensor for a human breathing monitor. BioMEMS sensors can be broadly categorized as either in vitro or in vivo sensors. Automated MEMS-based lab-on-a-chip platforms have become an established bioMEMS system for basic life science research and drug discovery. It is currently being used to assess the quality of isolated DNA or proteins.