The ability to maintain a healthy body weight has become an increasingly common roadblock in modern medicine as extreme high or low weight can lead to and aggravate existing medical conditions. Achieving a healthy weight is often difficult for those who are overweight, obese or underweight since a great deal of food intake and exercise tracking is usually a requirement for effective weight targets. The accuracy and effectiveness of this process could be increased drastically if a real-time fat oxidation biomarker monitoring device were available. Recent clinical studies of fat oxidation by the team and others have demonstrated the importance of ketones as biomarkers with a great opportunity for those patients who need proactively concrete weight management interventions. In addition to eating disorders, conditions related to ketoacidosis, which is a well-known risk state for type 1 diabetes, or ketosis state, a high ketone level state induced by low carb / high fat diets used to manage several diseases (such as epilepsy, type 2 diabetes, cancer among many others) are in need of close ketone monitoring. Although ketones are FDA approved fat oxidation biomarkers, there are relatively few ketone-based sensors available for consumer use. Those that do exist are based on blood, urine and breath test and are one-point-in-time use, sometime inaccurate, or far too invasive for everyday use. As a result, a huge need exists for the development of a passive and non-invasive ketone sensor. One possible solution is to develop a sensor that displays real time data regarding the wearer?s fat oxidation by tracking the acetone permeated through the skin of the sensor?s wearer. Researchers at Arizona State University (ASU) have developed a sensor technology for passive detection of acetone that has shown accurately monitoring acetone. However, extensive work is necessary to complete the sensor optimization to sense skin acetone, and integrate the sensor into a wearable. The team of researchers at ASU will work on the necessary tasks to create a prototype for testing in a pilot study. A medical science expert team at University of Arizona (UA) will work together with the sensor team to develop the first prototype. The sensor group at ASU will develop, optimize, build and test the wearable sensor analyzer. Meanwhile, the clinical experts at UA and industry partners at 3M Company will assure industry quality standards requirements, and provide feedback in the device and its user interface. The analyzer brings an unprecedented opportunity for weight and multiple disease management, since not only overcomes current barriers from existing ketone sensors, but also eliminates the patient?s burden of current approaches, which require personal tracking of weight, food intake and activity, while providing timely intervention feedback.
A wearable sensor for passive detection of skin ketone will be integrated with intelligent patients? monitoring algorithms for efficient treatment of eating disorders, including obesity and anorexia. The analyzer can be also applied to other diseases such as epilepsy, type 2 diabetes, and cancer diseases among other diseases. It brings an unprecedented real time continuous monitoring, overcomes current barriers from existing ketone sensors, and eliminates the patient?s burden of current approaches, providing timely intervention feedback.
