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并且容易感染，因此不能用于连续监测。近来，已经发现，来自呼出气或从皮肤散发的许多蒸气反映了各种疾病（诸如糖尿病、外周动脉疾病等）的状况。因此，可穿戴蒸汽传感器提供了一种完全非侵入性和连续监测的解决方案，为患者和社会带来了巨大的好处。I-Corps团队最近展示了新型石墨烯蒸汽传感器阵列，可以完全嵌入微型气相色谱柱中，进行快速（0.1秒）和灵敏（~ppb）的蒸汽检测。因此，可以制作可穿戴的、徽章大小的微型气相色谱柱系统，以收集和分析从皮肤散发的蒸气，具有芯片上数据处理和传输能力。拟议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样的柱，可以与石墨烯传感器阵列无缝集成。该团队还测试了石墨烯传感器的响应时间和灵敏度，检测速度比最先进的快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.