Many diseases (acute and chronic) and human physiological conditions (such as blood alcohol, oxygen, and glucose) need to be monitored continuously for timely clinical intervention and personalized treatment. However, conventional blood-based detection is invasive and prone to infection, and thus cannot be used for continuous monitoring. Recently, it has been found that many vapors from exhaled breath or transpiring from the skin reflect the conditions of various diseases (such as diabetes, peripheral artery disease, etc.). Therefore, wearable vapor sensors provide a completely non-invasive and continuous monitoring solution that tremendously benefits the patients and the society.
This I-Corps team has recently demonstrated novel graphene vapor sensor arrays that can be completely embedded in a micro-gas chromatography column for rapid (<0.1 s) and sensitive (~ppb) vapor detection. A wearable, badge-sized micro-gas chromatography column system can thus be made to collect and analyze vapors transpiring from the skin with on-chip data processing and transmission capability. The proposed project will be focused on the effort to commercialize the wearable micro-gas chromatography column technology. The team has designed and fabricated such columns that can be integrated with graphene sensor arrays seamlessly. The team has also tested the graphene sensor's response time and sensitivity and showed a detection speed over 100 times faster than the state-of-the-art.
