Wearable Textile-Based Microfluidic Self-Powered Biosensing System

Our biofluids, like sweat, contain many solutes and metabolites that are related to our health conditions. For example, sweat glucose concentration can be noninvasively measured to represent blood glucose concentration for diabetes management. Imagine your clothes can not only wick and adsorb your sweat to keep you dry but also collect and analyze your sweat to tell you your health status. This proposed project is designed to make that come to us closer. We will develop a textile-based microfluidic self-powered biosensing system which can simultaneously collect/deliver sweat and perform chemical composition analysis from sweat. A low-cost, solution-based method will be used to metallize the commercially available textiles with patterned thin gold coatings, which can still preserve the soft feeling and wicking property of the original textiles. Then biofuel cells as biosensors will be fabricated on the gold-coated textiles, which generate power by consuming analytes from sweat. A miniaturized electronic module will be integrated with the fabricated textile-based biosensors for wireless data transmission to our portable devices, such as the smartphone.

Faculty Supervisor:

Tricia Carmichael

Student:

Partner:

Northwestern University

Discipline:

Physics

Sector:

Education

University:

University of Windsor

Program: