Wireless power-up and readout from a label-free biosensor

Abstract

Wearable and implantable biosensors have rapidly entered the fields of health and biomedicine to diagnose diseases and physiological monitoring. The use of wired medical devices causes surgical complications, which can occur when wires break, become infected, generate electrical noise, and are incompatible with implantable applications. In contrast, wireless power transfer is ideal for biosensing applications since it does not necessitate direct connections between measurement tools and sensing systems, enabling remote use of the biosensors. In addition, wireless sensors eliminate the need for a battery or energy harvester, reducing the size of the sensor. As far as we are aware, this is the first report ever describing a new method for wireless readout of a label-free electronic biosensor for detecting protein biomarkers. Our results reveal that we are able to successfully detect target protein and corresponding antibodies within this wireless setup. We are able to distinguish target protein in purified samples from a blank PBS sample as a negative control by tracking gradual changes in impedance at the input of the transmitter (P-value = 0.00788). We also demonstrate real-time wireless quantification of cytokines within rheumatoid arthritis patient serum samples (P-value = 0.00891). A Fine Gaussian Support Vector Machine is also used to differentiate protein from negative controls with the highest accuracy from a dataset of 54 experiments.