Speaker: Sam Emaminejad, Ph.D.
Affiliation: Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, UCLA

Non-invasive and Wearable Molecular Diagnostic Platforms for Personalized and Precision Medicine

Wearable sensor technologies provide insight into the body’s physiological state continuously, and enable real-time feedback for timely intervention. Therefore, they play a critical role in the evaluation and improvement of the health and performance of individuals. Currently, commercialized non-invasive wearable technologies are only capable of tracking physical activities and vital signs, and fail to unobtrusively access molecular-level information related to the body’s dynamic chemistry. To this end, sweat-based wearable biomonitoring is one of the most promising candidates to merge this gap. Sweat is a rich source of physiological information that can be retrieved non-invasively. It contains many critical analytes, which for the most part, are partitioned from blood with some degree of correlation. Therefore, in principle, sweat analysis can be used to provide proxy measures of blood target biomarkers for various clinical and physiological applications. Recent advances in electrochemical sensor development, flexible device fabrication and integration technology, and low power electronics have now set forth a path toward the development of wearable sweat biosensors to exploit this biofluid. However, despite such progress, the barrier to sweat-based health monitoring continues to be the inability to infer physiologically relevant information from sweat measurements to enable actionable feedback. In this talk, we will discuss the underlying scientific and technological bottlenecks, and provide examples of the wearable platforms that we have been developing to address them.