Non-invasive medical devices are fast emerging as powerful tools in providing quantitative, simple to parse data in assessing the health and wellness of users. These devices can provide information feedback to users on their state of health, and can potentially provide valuable real-time insight to doctors on the links between user consumption and activity on their respective health. Recently described epidermal electronics / multifunctional tattoos introduced from our lab and others have demonstrated sensing of biopressure, bioelectricity, analyte concentration, bacteria, and more. These structures potentially represent the evolution of wearable devices as they possess a negligible form factor and conform to any surface (such as skin or teeth), minimizing user impact. These devices also bypass more traditional, wearable gadgets that often require bulky mechanical fixtures or straps, require complex microfluidic systems or integrated electronics, cannot provide dynamic readout, and cannot be disposed of easily. Dielectric sensors are a class of structures that are able to probe the composition of a biofluid via their impedance spectrum, and can be configured for remote sensing via radio waves. These devices can be composed of isolated, thin film circuits, and are directly amenable to epidermal or tattoo formats. This measurement methodology is inherently tremendously powerful, as it can potentially measure multiple analytes at once by probing multiple resonance peaks, and can potentially be piggybacked onto existing RFID infrastructure for data readout. However, these capabilities have not yet been demonstrated, and under real-world applications dielectric sensors have often proven difficult to use. This is often due to simplistic readout (devices will directly correlate a single metric such s the real value of the impedance at a frequency to a biomarker) and are thus can be sensitive from user to user or to environmental conditions. Herein, the applicant will leverage the expertise and knowledge of the labs of Dr. Omenetto and colleagues to bring practical usability to these dielectric antennas, bridging the gap between laboratory measurement and real-time, and real-world health monitoring applications. The end-goal is to generate disposable, skin and teeth-mounted, dielectric sensors to remotely probe the presence of biomarkers in sweat, saliva, and potentially blood to draw definitive links between user nutrition and their health.
This proposal seeks to create non-invasive, wireless sensor tattoos to be tagged onto the human body for probing the composition of saliva, sweat, or blood. These wireless sensors would present negligible impediment to the user, and would require next to no upkeep to maintain, potentially facilitating an unprecedented level of subject data collection and dissemination. Such data could yield conclusive links between diet, activity, biomarkers, and public health.
