Discretised microfluidics for noninvasive health monitoring using sweat sensing

Abstract

Monitoring of chemical biomarker concentrations is often necessary in modern healthcare facilities, but it remains a challenge to do this frequently, minimally invasively to the patient, and fit to workflows of healthcare professionals. The use of sweat as a biofluid can address these issues. Unlike blood, sweat can be noninvasively and continuously sampled without direct involvement of a professional, and sweat contains a rich composition of biomarkers. However, patients in resting state have extremely low sweat rates and they produce correspondingly small sweat volumes, which makes sweat sensing of hospitalised patients highly challenging. We propose a unique solution that enables the use of sweat as a viable biofluid for noninvasive health monitoring, by actively transporting the sweat in a discretised manner. Our device uses electrowetting-on-dielectrics (EWOD) to create and move sweat droplets with a volume of around 1 nanolitre from a sweat gland to sensors integrated in the device. We present the first wearable device with integrated EWOD, and we show that it can collect and transport sweat on-body, while measuring sweat rate.