I remember microfluidics research being somewhat in vogue a decade ago. Asking as a complete layman - did any practical applications come out of it? Any use in the industry?
Single cell RNA sequencing is a very useful technique that relies on microfluidics. It allows researchers to isolate individual cells then "read" the RNA content of them. This lets you identify (very approximately) what behaviors a cell is doing in the tissue it came from. Still mostly a research tool, but it's going to move into the clinic in the next 10 years, I'd guess.
10x Genomics (https://www.10xgenomics.com/) is the biggest company building the machines for this. They're publicly traded.
As with many of these "laboratory" technologies, there is not much an "end-user" would see of it.
Microfluidics is being used in large scales in biological labs for sample analysis etc., so yes, there are practical applications but none that any random household needs or could even make any use of :)
There are indeed a few practical applications. Next to Berkely lights, there is e.g. the LabChip from PerkinElmer that separates DNA and proteins. I had hoped that there would be many more examples by now. Most presentations that I see about microfluids still go in a lot of detail on how difficult it is to make. This hasn't really changed over the last decade, which signals to me we still need quite some innovation to make this mainstream.
If you want to play around with digital microfluids at home, check out the OpenDrop from gaudi.ch (http://www.gaudi.ch/OpenDrop/). I haven't played around with it yet, as I haven't found a practical use of this.
