A wearable chemical–electrophysiological hybrid biosensing system for real-time health and fitness monitoring

By Somayeh Imani, Amay J. Bandodkar, A. Mohan, Rajan Kumar, Shen Yu, Joseph Wang, P. Mercier. Nature Communications, 2016

751 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Flexible, wearable sensing devices can yield important information about the underlying physiology of a human subject for applications in real-time health and fitness monitoring. Despite significant progress in the fabrication of flexible biosensors that naturally comply with the epidermis, most designs measure only a small number of physical or electrophysiological parameters, and neglect the rich chemical information available from biomarkers. Here, we introduce a skin-worn wearable hybrid sensing system that offers simultaneous real-time monitoring of a biochemical (lactate) and an electrophysiological signal (electrocardiogram), for more comprehensive fitness monitoring than from physical or electrophysiological sensors alone. The two sensing modalities, comprising a three-electrode amperometric lactate biosensor and a bipolar electrocardiogram sensor, are co-fabricated on a flexible substrate and mounted on the skin. Human experiments reveal that physiochemistry and electrophysiology can be measured simultaneously with negligible cross-talk, enabling a new class of hybrid sensing devices. Wearable sensors can provide continuous, convenient feedback for users but typically focus on a small number of physiological parameters. Here, the authors report a skin-worn sensing system that combines a biosensor for lactate detection with an electrocardiogram in one patch, with applications for exercise monitoring.

Subfields: Biomedical Engineering, Cognitive Neuroscience, Electrical and Electronic Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ca05604884f0b3cf597f80f1d61b2fcdd0f4707f

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In Biomedical Engineering

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Citations in the corpus

Flexible, Stretchable Sensors for Wearable Health Monitoring: Sensing Mechanisms, Materials, Fabrication Strategies and Features (2018, background): “The lactic acid in sweat can be used to track an individual’s performance and examine the tissue oxygenation and pressure ischemia for elders [13].”
Battery-free, skin-interfaced microfluidic/electronic systems for simultaneous electrochemical, colorimetric, and volumetric analysis of sweat (2019, background): “Because these subsystems are difficult to miniaturize, they dominate the overall form factor (12, 20, 31) in a way that leads to nonideal size and weight for mounting on the skin.”
Digital health for aging populations (2023, background): “…(such as blood pressure or heart rate) using single multi-modal epidermal patches, offer considerable promise for providing continuous and comprehensive healthcare monitoring and for alerting older adults and their caregivers to the occurrence of a variety of abnormal physiological changes 16,17 .”