The project is expected to pave the way for the development of in vivo nanosensors networks for biosensing applications with direct application to the next generation of health-centric smartphones and wearable devices. This technology has the potential to radically change current disease diagnosis and treatment techniques. The idea of improving the accuracy of existing diagnostic techniques based on individual nano-biosensors by utilizing a distributed network of coordinated nano-devices, is transformative. This project contributes to a much wider and ambitious vision of advanced health-monitoring and drug delivery systems, using a novel interdisciplinary approach to leverage and combine the state-of-the-art in nano-biosensing, wireless communication and networks, as well as distributed data collection and signal processing.
Intellectual Description: The objective of the proposed research is to prove the feasibility of cooperative spectroscopy for real-time in vivo nano-biosensing applications. The ultimate goal is to replace the external independent excitation and measurement system used in classical spectroscopy by a network of coordinated nano-devices, able to both excite and measure the response of nano-biofunctional particles. The benefits of this approach are several. First, the much smaller size and lower power requirements than classical spectroscopy systems will allow the integration of the proposed platform in the next generation of health-centric smartphones as well as new types of wearable devices. Second, the placement of the nanodevices in close contact with the entity to measure on a fingerprint touch scanner or eventually inside the human body, allows for the transmission and detection of low-power, low-noise signals. Third, the collection of the received signal at different nano-devices that collaborate with each other, allows for much more accurate sensing using advanced signal processing for distributed data collection.
