Wearable and intelligent biomarker physiological monitoring through mechanically-adaptive, polymeric electrochemical transistors
Abstract
Wearable health monitoring devices and technologies that can be intimately integrated with human bodies are of increasing interest in both clinical and daily healthcare owing to their potential capability of offering continuous monitoring of peoples physiological and even mental conditions. Up to date, in spite of the extensive developments of wearable sensors for measuring physical body signals, technologies for on-skin biomarker monitoring from body fluids are still waiting for focused efforts and adequate progresses in addressing two major challenges: 1) with sweat being the most accessible on-skin fluid, the sensors need to make conformable contact with skins for effect collection of sweat; 2) for majority of health-related biomarkers in trace-level concentrations, the sensors sensitivity and selectivity need to be largely improved. Besides, on the system level, the other major technological need for such wearable physiological monitoring that continuously generate a large amount data from individually-different people is the effective and efficient processing of the data, for which the artificial intelligence (AI) computation could be most promising solution. With the neuromorphic devices recently being developed to be a promising hardware platform for AI, there has been no success of turning them into wearable form-factors.Actually, for both biochemical sensing and neuromorphic computation, organic electrochemical transification and non-volatile signal retention. However, there are several major fundamental and technological gaps existing for using his platform to realize the two types of devices that can satisfy the requirements from wearable physiological monitoring. So far, there have been very little efforts in the functionalization of redox-active conjugated polymers for enabling selective interactions with biomarkers, which prevents the effective utilization of OECTs high amplification for achieving high sensitivity. Besides, there hasnt been a strategy for introducing the stretchability onto these polymers without affecting such performance in electrochemical transistors. Here, in this proposal entitled Wearable and intelligent biomarker physiological monitoring through mechanically-adaptive, polymeric electrochemical transistors, Dr. Sihong Wang from the University of Chicago will fill these major gaps in material designs and device architectures for realizing two key device technologies towards wearable and AI-programmed biomarker physiological monitoring systems: (1) soft/stretchable bio-chemical sensor devices for detecting biomarkers from sweat with high sensitivity and selectivity; (2) skin-like neuromorphic transistors for neuromorphic computing with large dynamic range and long information retention time. Specifically, this research will include five major tasks, including (1) material designs for bioreceptor-functionalization on conjugated polymers; (2) imparting stretchability onto redoxachemical sensors based on volumetric sensing mechanism; (4) developing stretchable neuromorphic transistors; (5) system integrations for the on-skin sweat sensing and machine-learning data processing. This proposed research defines new paradigms in basic materials research on conjugated polymers and applied technology research for wearable physiological monitoring.This work, if successful, will lead to several new capabilities that are highly relevant to Navys missions, including: (1) continuous and accurate monitoring warfighters physical and mental conditions; (2) on-body close-loop and autonomous decision-making systems; (3) soft, polymeric and lightweight energy storage units.
Document Details
- Document Type
- DoD Grant Award
- Publication Date
- Apr 06, 2021
- Source ID
- N000142112266
Entities
People
- Sihong Wang
Organizations
- Office of Naval Research
- United States Navy
- University of Chicago