SBIR Phase I: Low-Cost and Sample-Efficient Micromachined Ultrasonic Sensor for Blood Coagulation Time Monitoring

该项目更广泛的影响/商业潜力在于能够实现一种新颖而强大的诊断技术，这可能为新型微尺度超声表征设备的出现打开大门。该项目的直接影响是在生物医学传感器领域，旨在提高我们老龄化人口医疗保健的可及性和可负担性。使用本项目开发的简单准确的医疗点设备可以大大降低医疗保健成本，同时确保社会更加健康。这对于目前医疗保健成本正在成为家庭，政府和医疗保健行业日益增加的负担的时代尤为重要。此外，该项目开发的技术有可能被修改用于其他行业，例如测量贵重材料的粘度。如果成功，该技术可以被许可用于其他几种产品，以大大增加其经济影响。这个小企业创新研究（SBIR）第一阶段项目旨在研究利用微型超声波液体传感器测量非常小体积的血液（小于1微升）的凝固时间的可行性。如果成功，这种创新的传感器技术将成为精确且经济实惠的床旁（POC）凝血监测系统的基础。在医疗诊断领域中存在对能够测量血液凝固的电子设备的需要，该电子设备足够便宜、可靠并且使用方便，并且允许未经训练的个人或健康专业人员在诸如家庭、医疗急救场所和战场的位置中的护理点使用。这些设备还需要在尽可能小的样本量下运行。微谐振传感器是一种可行的解决方案，并提供了许多优点，如准数字输出，简单的电子接口，小尺寸和高灵敏度。然而，由于在诸如血液的液体环境中操作时谐振结构的固有阻尼，这种谐振传感器用于测量生物流体的应用受到限制。本提案中提出的传感器将实现电子接口的便利性，同时在测量粘胶液体特性时保持高性能。

The broader impact/commercial potential of this project is in enabling a novel and powerful diagnostic technique that could open the door to emergence of a new class of micro-scale ultrasonic characterization devices. The immediate impact of the project is in the field of biomedical sensors and aims at increasing the accessibility and affordability of health care for our aging population. Access to simple and accurate Point of Care devices such as those developed in this project can greatly drive down the cost of health care while ensuring a healthier society. This is especially important for the current time where the cost of healthcare is a becoming an increasing burden for families, government and healthcare industry. In addition, the technology developed in this project has potential to be modified for use in other industries, such as measuring viscosity of precious materials. If successful, the technology can be licensed for use in several other products to greatly increase its economic impact.This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project aims at studying the feasibility of utilizing a micro-scale ultrasonic liquid sensor for measuring the coagulation time of very small volumes of blood (less than 1µL). If successful, this innovative sensor technology will be the basis for an accurate and affordable Point of Care (POC) blood coagulation monitoring system. A need exists in the field of medical diagnostics for an electronic device able to measure blood coagulation, which is sufficiently inexpensive, reliable and convenient to use, and that permits points-of-care use by untrained individuals or health professionals in locations such as the home, medical emergency sites, and battlefields. These devices also need to operate with a sample sizes as small as practically possible. Micro-resonant sensors are a viable solution and offer many advantages such as quasi-digital outputs, simple electronics interface, small size, and high sensitivities. However, the application of such resonant sensors for measuring biofluids has been limited due to the inherent dampening of the resonant structure when operated in liquid environments such as blood. The proposed sensor in this proposal will achieve the ease of electronic interfacing while maintaining high performance when measuring viscose liquid properties.