A.J. Bandodkar
North Carolina State University,
United States
Keywords: wearable sensors, wireless electronics, microfluidics, personalized medicine
Summary:
Wearable and implantable sensors are gaining traction for longitudinal monitoring of the human body. While the benefits of such sensors are immense, they typically face issues pertaining to their bulky size, need for complex electronics, and power sources with large footprints. Chemical sensing has additional challenges such as the need for sample pretreatment, multi-step detection principles, and dependence on kinetics-controlled reactions that make it hard to obtain accurate results. Overcoming these challenges is crucial for the use of these emerging classes of sensors for applications in translational medicine. In this talk, I will describe the various strategies that my group is investigating to provide practical solutions to these grand challenges. I will discuss advanced wearable microfluidics embedded with passive/active pumps and valves for on-demand sampling, miniaturized self-powered sensors inspired by biofuel cell technology, and wireless battery-free electronics that can be interfaced with the skin or completely embedded inside the body. I will demonstrate how these solutions are being presently applied to real-life scenarios with data from human and animal studies.