Recent years have witnessed an increased use of droplet-based microfluidic techniques in a
wide variety of chemical and biological assays. Nevertheless, obtaining dynamic data from
these platforms has remained challenging, as this often requires reading the same droplets
(possibly thousands of them) multiple times over a wide range of intervals (from milliseconds
to hours). In this review, we introduce the elemental techniques for the formation and
manipulation of microfluidic droplets, together with the most recent developments in these …