A.J. Bandodkar
North Carolina State University,
United States
Keywords: wearable sensors, sweat analysis, wound monitoring, microfluidics
Summary:
Sweat represents a distinctive biofluid with significant potential for non-invasive physiological monitoring. The past decade has seen considerable interest in the development of novel, wearable sensors for monitoring a variety of biomarkers in human sweat, with applications spanning the understanding of human physiology, drug pharmacokinetics, and the detection of environmental toxin bioaccumulation. While these sensors hold substantial promise, establishing unequivocal clinical significance of sweat markers necessitates a systematic investigation of these markers using mature, widely accepted gold-standard analytical techniques. Such techniques, however, are typically dependent on trained personnel and expensive, lab-based equipment, and are characterized by time-consuming, multi-step sample preparation and analysis procedures. This presentation will detail our group's efforts in developing advanced wearable devices capable of performing complex, gold-standard analytical techniques in-situ, requiring only a smartphone camera for data acquisition. I will illustrate the devices' capabilities in both non-invasive sweat sensing and wound exudate analysis for the early detection of chronic wounds.