Adhesive film turns smartwatch into biochemical health monitoring system


Date:
June 17, 2020
Source:
University of California - Los Angeles
Summary:
Engineers have designed a thin adhesive film that could upgrade a
consumer smartwatch into a powerful health-monitoring system. The
system looks for chemical indicators found in sweat to give a
real-time snapshot of what's happening inside the body.



FULL STORY ==========================================================================
UCLA engineers have designed a thin adhesive film that could upgrade a
consumer smartwatch into a powerful health-monitoring system. The system
looks for chemical indicators found in sweat to give a real-time snapshot
of what's happening inside the body. A study detailing the technology
was published in the journal of Science Advances.


========================================================================== Smartwatches can already help keep track of how far you've walked,
how much you've slept and your heart rate. Newer models even promise
to monitor blood pressure. Working with a tethered smartphone or other
devices, someone can use a smartwatch to keep track of those health
indicators over a long period of time.

What these watches can't do, yet, is monitor your body chemistry. For
that, they need to track biomarker molecules found in body fluids that
are highly specific indicators of our health, such as glucose and lactate, which tell how well your body's metabolism is working.

To address that need, the researchers engineered a disposable,
double-sided film that attaches to the underside of a smartwatch. The
film can detect molecules such as metabolites and certain nutrients that
are present in body sweat in very tiny amounts. They also built a custom smartwatch and an accompanying app to record data.

"The inspiration for this work came from recognizing that we already
have more than 100 million smartwatches and other wearable tech
sold worldwide that have powerful data-collection, computation and
transmission capabilities," said study leader Sam Emaminejad, an
assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at the UCLA
Samueli School of Engineering. "Now we have come up with a solution
to upgrade these wearables into health-monitoring platforms, enabling
them to measure molecular-level information so that they give us a much
deeper understanding of what's happening inside our body in real time."
The skin-touching side of the adhesive film collects and analyzes the
chemical makeup of droplets of sweat. The watch-facing side turns those chemical signals into electrical ones that can be read, processed and
then displayed on the smartwatch.



==========================================================================
The co-lead authors on the paper are graduate student Yichao Zhao
and postdoctoral scholar Bo Wang. Both are members of Emaminejad's Interconnected and Integrated Bioelectronics Lab at UCLA.

"By making our sensors on a double-sided adhesive and vertically
conductive film, we eliminated the need for the external connectors,"
Zhao said. "In this way, not only have we made it easier to integrate
sensors with consumer electronics, but we've also eliminated the effect
of a user's motion that can interfere with the chemical data collection."
"By incorporating appropriate enzymatic-sensing layers in the film, we specifically targeted glucose and lactate, which indicate body metabolism levels, and nutrients such as choline," Wang said.

While the team designed a custom smartwatch and app to work with the
system, Wang said the concept could someday be applied to popular models
of smartwatches.

The researchers tested the film on someone who was sedentary, someone
doing office work and people engaged in vigorous activity, such as boxing,
and found the system was effective in a wide variety of scenarios. They
also noted that the stickiness of the film was sufficient for it to stay
on the skin and on the watch without the need for a wrist strap for an
entire day.

Over the past few years, Emaminejad has led research on using wearable technology to detect indicator molecules through sweat. This latest
study shows a new way that such technologies could be widely adopted.

"We are particularly excited about our technology because by transforming
our smartwatches and wearable tech into biomonitoring platforms,
we could capture multidimensional, longitudinal and physiologically
relevant datasets at an unprecedented scale, basically across hundreds
of millions of people," Emaminejad said. "This thin sensing film that
works with a watch shows such a path forward."

========================================================================== Story Source: Materials provided by
University_of_California_-_Los_Angeles. Note: Content may be edited for
style and length.


========================================================================== Journal Reference:
1. Yichao Zhao, Bo Wang, Hannaneh Hojaiji, Zhaoqing Wang, Shuyu Lin,
Christopher Yeung, Haisong Lin, Peterson Nguyen, Kaili Chiu, Kamyar
Salahi, Xuanbing Cheng, Jiawei Tan, Betto Alcitlali Cerrillos, Sam
Emaminejad. A wearable freestanding electrochemical sensing system.

Science Advances, 2020; 6 (12): eaaz0007 DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.aaz0007 ==========================================================================

Link to news story: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/06/200617174811.htm

--- up 21 weeks, 1 day, 2 hours, 34 minutes
* Origin: -=> Castle Rock BBS <=- Now Husky HPT Powered! (1337:3/111)