The broader impact/commercial potential of this project is through providing a wearable alcohol monitoring device to the general population which will lead to a better awareness about alcohol consumption, and ultimately enhance health, lengthen life, and reduce burden of illness and disability. Incautious alcohol use causes health and social problems that either manifest over time due to sustained drinking (e.g., heart disease, cancer, liver disease, diabetes, etc.), or are short term effects of acute intoxication and/or impaired decision-making (e.g., motor vehicle crashes, violence, etc.). Excessive alcohol use led to approximately 88,000 deaths per year in the United States from 2006-2010 and in 2006 alone cost the economy approximately $224 billion. In light of the above social impact, the proposed graphene based wearable alcohol monitoring device addresses the urgent need to implement health approaches to reduce the loss of life and the huge economic costs that result from excessive drinking. In fact, the growing need for personalized health-care is highlighted by the estimated market size of $19 billion for wearable biosensors by 2018, pointing towards the potential commercial opportunity for self-monitoring alcohol sensors as well.
This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project addresses the unmet need for a small, light, unobtrusive, convenient-to-use alcohol sensor for real-time self-monitoring of alcohol consumption. Excessive alcohol consumption is a health risk behavior and the fourth leading preventable cause of death in the United States. Most strategies to improve safe drinking rely on obtaining accurate and timely information about alcohol consumption; these include self-report of number and timing of drinks, breathalyzers, blood analysis by lab, and wearable devices. Wearable alcohol monitors have clear advantages in terms of accuracy and feasibility compared to other methods for self-monitoring. However, current wearable devices for alcohol monitoring are bulky, inconvenient to use, obtrusive, and do not provide consistent, real-time data on the level of intoxication. In this Phase I SBIR study, a graphene based nanoelectronic wearable sensor will be developed for real-time alcohol monitoring using the vapors transpiring through the skin. The graphene sensors will be tested on recruited adult volunteers and benchmarked with standard breathalyzer readings. Good correlation between the graphene sensor and a breathalyzer will confirm the technical and commercial feasibility of our proposed project leading to a Phase II SBIR proposal.
