I-Corps: Wearable Transdermal Vapor Sensors for Non-invasive Continuous Disease Monitoring

许多疾病（急性和慢性）和人体生理状况（如血液酒精、氧气和葡萄糖）需要持续监测，以便及时进行临床干预和个性化治疗。然而，传统的基于血液的检测是侵入性的，容易感染，因此不能用于连续监测。最近，人们发现，从呼出的气体或从皮肤蒸腾出来的许多蒸汽反映了各种疾病（如糖尿病、外周动脉疾病等）的状况。因此，可穿戴式蒸汽传感器提供了一种完全无创的连续监测解决方案，极大地造福于患者和社会。I-Corps团队最近展示了新型石墨烯蒸汽传感器阵列，该阵列可以完全嵌入微气相色谱柱中，用于快速（0.1 s）和敏感（~ppb）的蒸汽检测。因此，可以制造一种可穿戴的徽章大小的微型气相色谱柱系统，用于收集和分析从皮肤中散发出来的蒸汽，并具有芯片上的数据处理和传输能力。拟议的项目将侧重于可穿戴微型气相色谱柱技术的商业化。该团队设计并制造了这种可以与石墨烯传感器阵列无缝集成的柱。研究小组还测试了石墨烯传感器的响应时间和灵敏度，结果显示，石墨烯传感器的检测速度比目前最先进的传感器快100倍以上。

Many diseases (acute and chronic) and human physiological conditions (such as blood alcohol, oxygen, and glucose) need to be monitored continuously for timely clinical intervention and personalized treatment. However, conventional blood-based detection is invasive and prone to infection, and thus cannot be used for continuous monitoring. Recently, it has been found that many vapors from exhaled breath or transpiring from the skin reflect the conditions of various diseases (such as diabetes, peripheral artery disease, etc.). Therefore, wearable vapor sensors provide a completely non-invasive and continuous monitoring solution that tremendously benefits the patients and the society.This I-Corps team has recently demonstrated novel graphene vapor sensor arrays that can be completely embedded in a micro-gas chromatography column for rapid (0.1 s) and sensitive (~ppb) vapor detection. A wearable, badge-sized micro-gas chromatography column system can thus be made to collect and analyze vapors transpiring from the skin with on-chip data processing and transmission capability. The proposed project will be focused on the effort to commercialize the wearable micro-gas chromatography column technology. The team has designed and fabricated such columns that can be integrated with graphene sensor arrays seamlessly. The team has also tested the graphene sensor's response time and sensitivity and showed a detection speed over 100 times faster than the state-of-the-art.