All-Printed Nanomembrane Sensors and Bioelectronics for Wireless and Continuous Monitoring of Vascular Health

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This project promotes a comprehensive understanding of sensor mechanics, fluid dynamics, wireless communication, and printing-based manufacturing to overcome current limitations in implantable bioelectronics while advancing knowledge in vascular health. Accurate blood flow monitoring can reveal a critically important state of a patient's health, offering clinicians the information required for diagnosis and treatment. Unfortunately, current methods for detecting blood flow conditions are invasive with multiple procedures. In addition, the existing implantable system shows significant knowledge gaps in material integration and electronics manufacturing that can collectively serve as a design guideline for a complete system, considering sensitivity, compatibility, and wireless communication. This project aims to study and understand essential engineering fundamentals in mechanics, material integration, printing processes, and wireless methods for an implantable system. These mechanical, material, and electrical design principles will offer a broadly functional and adaptable foundation for a new class of implantable bioelectronics with distinct advantages of soft microstructures for enhanced contact to vessel walls, minimal disruption to hemodynamics, and enhanced wireless detection quality and distances. The findings resulting from this project will improve the understanding of blood flow dynamics to address the widespread and significant impact of vascular diseases. The engineering knowledge, including material preparation, fabrication, design, and sensing strategies, will be broadly applicable to improving implantable electronics and understanding many physiological processes. In addition, the interdisciplinary understandings and gains of various scientific knowledge and engineering materials will be used to educate abroad range of students in the field of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.Recently, various implantable devices have been developed specifically for vascular applications. However, these devices require the use of a bridging wire that is susceptible to fracture, while the readout distance is limited to less than a few centimeters. Despite this limitation, the standard procedure is to implant a biosensing system in the vascular system. In addition, since blood vessels are narrow and highly contoured, the required hemodynamic monitoring sensors must be compliant, soft, and miniaturized for seamless implantation and avoiding flow interference. To overcome the significant knowledge and technological gaps in the implantable systems, this project aims to study and understand essential engineering fundamentals in mechanics, material integration strategies, materials processing, and passive wireless electronics for an implantable biosensing system that seamlessly integrates with blood vessels for continuous hemodynamic monitoring. This project has the following research objectives, including 1) understanding of high-throughput printing of soft microstructures and integration for enhanced sensitivity of biosensors, 2) study of passive wireless sensing principles and 3D, multi-material integration for a high-performance wireless stent, and 3) study of a biosensing system deployment and fluid dynamics for long-term, multiplex wireless sensing. The fundamental principles revealed through this project will define a new guideline for emerging implantable systems subject to demanding requirements of low-profile form factor, sensitivity, implantability, and wireless performance. The engineering basics and biosensing system framework resulting from this project will advance the field of implantable bioelectronics to monitor and understand vascular and cardiac functionality, diagnostics, and therapeutics.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.