Guest Seminar - Wearable Biosensors towards Healthcare Decentralization

The  rather  reactive  and  centralized  medical  approaches  in  today’s  healthcare  system  prevent individuals  from  obtaining  diagnosis  and  treatment  in  a  timely  and  accessible  manner.  Digital transformation in healthcare, enabled by point‐of‐care (POC) devices at the frontend, is needed to shift  toward a preventive and proactive care model. Presently, commercially available devices  for remote health monitoring are majorly limited to body’s vitals and glucose levels, limiting access to healthcare. To  this end, I developed a variety of biosensors  for wearables and POC  testing. In  this seminar, I will address  two major challenges in biosensors  ‐ 1) realizing an autonomous device by integrating  flexible electronics and  solid‐state electrochemical  sensors in a  single  robust  platform and  2)  achieving  sensitive,  uniform  detection  for  reliable  analyte  quantifications.  Specifically,  the wearable ultralow‐volume  sweat  sensors makes  sweat a viable mode of health monitoring at  the molecular  level  across  activities,  whether  active  or  sedentary,  and  across  user  groups,  whether young or old, healthy or ill. By using  the sensors, I showed  that continuous sweat analysis can be done  to  study  how  the  body’s  endogenous  and  stimulated  sweating  response  relates  to  stress, metabolic conditions, and potentially neurological afflictions through multiplexed quantification of ions, metabolites, and drugs. I have also enabled POC and diagnostic testing to a broader class of biomolecules  such  as  drugs,  cytokines  and  proteins  detection.  I  developed  a  method  to  enable uniform  one‐point  calibration  sensors  and  achieved  multiplexed  detection  of  biochemicals  at significantly different concentrations.