Wearable Lab-in-a-watch Optical Sensor for Non-invasive Sweat Diagnosis

Wearable non-invasive molecular sensing technology will be an essential part for future personalized medicine. Current non-invasive wearable devices monitor heart rate and other physical, kinetic values such as temperature and body gestures, steps and location. It would be of tremendous added value if they could identify and quantify health factors that take part in control of human physiology, such as sweat glucose molecules that reflects blood glucose level [1]. Failure to control blood glucose increases Body Mass Index, resulting in tremendous health risks in current society.

This project aims to develop a wearable optical sensor on skin by integrating an electro-plasmonic chip [2] into an optical watch that together allows controllable sweat stimulation and on-watch continuous detection of the sweat glucose. When fully implemented, we may explore integration of an portable Raman spectrometer into the chip to detect other sweat biomarkers such as extracellular vesicles [3].

Reference:

1. Moyer, J., et al., Correlation Between Sweat Glucose and Blood Glucose in Subjects with Diabetes. Diabetes Technology & Therapeutics 2012, 14 (5), 398-402.
2. Lifang He, et al., Silver nanosheet-coated inverse opal film as a highly active and uniform SERS substrate. Journal of Materials Chemistry 22, no. 4 (2012): 1370-1374.
3. Mogera et al., Wearable plasmonic paper–based microfluidics for continuous sweat analysis, Science Advance 8, eabn1736 (2022)