New wearable product that monitors caffeine levels in the body
As we all know, blood pressure, blood oxygen content, and electrocardiogram are very important health indicators. With the rise of wearable products, blood oxygen sensors are widely embedded in various consumer electronic products so that users can monitor them in real time. Engineers at the University of California, San Diego have recently developed a skin patch that can be worn around the neck to track blood pressure and heart rate, while the product can also monitor the user's glucose, lactate, alcohol or caffeine levels.
"Wearable sensors, intertwined with the concepts of telemedicine, medical IoT, and precision medicine, offer the ability to actively and remotely monitor physiological parameters," the team wrote in a study published in Nature Biomedical Engineering. "
They continued: "Wearable sensors can continuously generate data without causing any physical discomfort or interfering with daily activities, thereby enhancing the quality of self-monitoring by the wearer and improving the quality of patient care."
According to the University of California, the device is the first to monitor multiple biochemical levels in the human body alongside cardiovascular signals. Joseph Wang, a professor of nanoengineering at UC San Diego and a co-author of the study, said the novelty of the device is that they take completely different sensors and fuse them on a single small platform as small as a postage stamp. . With this wearable device, a great deal of information can be collected non-invasively without causing discomfort or interfering with daily activities. The researchers pointed out that heart rate and blood pressure can both dynamically and directly reflect the body's physiological conditions, while other biomarker levels can help patients monitor the situation. A device that is not very present is very beneficial for infant monitoring. By integrating different sensing modalities into a soft, skin-friendly, tattoo-like patch, they can be used by both newborns and the elderly with minimal discomfort.
The device uses ultrasonic sensors to monitor blood pressure and heart rate, and electrochemical sensors to measure levels of biomarkers. The research team was interested in biomarkers of glucose, lactate, caffeine and alcohol because they affect blood pressure. Let's say you're monitoring blood pressure and notice a daytime spike, but you think it's a monitoring error. And biomarker readings can tell you whether those spikes are due to alcohol or caffeine consumption. This combination of sensors can give you this kind of information. Lead author, Julian Sempianato, said in a news release. One of the sensor's biggest challenges was eliminating signal interference, including physically shielding the chemical sensor on the blood pressure sensor. Another first author, Dr. Lin Muyang in nanoengineering, mentioned that finding the right materials, optimizing the overall layout, and integrating different electronic devices in a seamless way took a lot of time to overcome these challenges.
The design of the device is still in progress. Now, the sensor needs to be connected to a power source and a bench machine to display its readings. The team's ultimate goal is to bring all of this together and make everything wireless. "We hope to make a complete wearable system," said Lin Muyang.
In the past decade, the application of wearable devices has been expanding. Wearables are already being used to track fitness and sleep, study people with dementia, and even help shape the future of precision medicine. Wearable patches are very attractive given their convenience and relative non-invasiveness.