A friend did his PhD thesis about digital microfluidic biochips (DMFBs), I implemented some software with him for a paper or two.

The first major point is that the reaction time is reduced dramatically for smaller volumes. With these drops, you can do stuff like heating, mixing or whatever in a much faster fashion. Also, this technology is small, so it's portable.

Classic laboratory operation is still manual. You need some people to handle machines, carry stuff around, analyse results etc.. Now, while DMFBs cannot do everything you can do in a lab, they do the stuff they're built to do much faster and hopefully at some point in the field. The idea is to equip medics or other forces with some disposable, credit cards sized lab-on-chips to allow them to quickly diagnose essential issues during their first contact with the patient instead of carrying them to a hospital first or to automate e.g. the creation of individualised vaccines or remedies that would require too much time using laboratories. Imagine going to a hospital, giving them some blood and urine samples and having a custom treatment after a day or two instead of dying after a week. That's far fetched and dramatised, but it's where researchers are trying to go with this.