16th April 2018 Tiny injectable sensor could monitor long-term alcohol use Engineers at the University of California San Diego have developed a miniature, ultra-low power injectable biosensor that could be used for continuous, long-term alcohol monitoring. The chip is small enough to be implanted in the body just beneath the surface of the skin and is powered wirelessly by a wearable device, such as a smartwatch or patch.
"The ultimate goal of this work is to develop a routine, unobtrusive alcohol and drug monitoring device for patients in substance abuse treatment programs," said Drew Hall, an electrical engineering professor at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering who led the project. His team presented this technology at the 2018 IEEE Custom Integrated Circuits Conference (CICC). One of the challenges for patients in treatment programs is the lack of convenient tools for routine monitoring. Breathalysers, currently the most common way to estimate blood alcohol levels, are clunky devices that require patient initiation and are not that accurate, Hall noted. A blood test is the most accurate method, but it needs to be performed by a trained technician. Tattoo-based alcohol sensors that can be worn on the skin are a promising new alternative, but they can be easily removed and are only single-use. "A tiny injectable sensor – that can be administered in a clinic without surgery – could make it easier for patients to follow a prescribed course of monitoring for extended periods of time," Hall said. The biosensor chip seen here measures just one cubic millimetre in size and can be injected under the skin in interstitial fluid – a thin layer of fluid that surrounds the body's cells. It contains a sensor that is coated with alcohol oxidase, an enzyme that selectively interacts with alcohol to generate a byproduct that can be electrochemically detected. These signals are transmitted wirelessly to a nearby wearable device (such as a smartwatch), which also wirelessly powers the chip. Two additional sensors on the chip measure background signals and pH levels. These get cancelled out to make the alcohol reading more accurate.
The researchers designed the chip to consume as little power as possible – just 970 nanowatts in total, or roughly one million times less power than a typical smartphone consumes when making a phone call. "We don't want the chip to have a significant impact on the battery life of the wearable device," explains Hall. "And since we're implanting this, we don't want a lot of heat being locally generated inside the body, or a battery that is potentially toxic." One of the ways the chip operates on such ultra-low power is by transmitting data via a technique called backscattering. This occurs when a nearby device like a smartwatch sends radio frequency signals to the chip, and the chip sends data by modifying and reflecting those signals back to the smartwatch. Hall's team also designed ultra-low power sensor readout circuits for the chip and minimised its measurement time to just three seconds, resulting in less power consumption. The researchers tested the chip in vitro with a setup that mimicked an implanted environment. This involved mixtures of ethanol in diluted human serum underneath layers of pig skin. For future studies, they plan to test the chip in live animals. Hall's group is developing separate versions of this chip that can monitor other molecules and drugs in the body. "This is a proof-of-concept platform technology," said Hall. "We've shown that this chip can work for alcohol, but we envision creating others that can detect different substances of abuse and injecting a customised cocktail of them into a patient to provide long-term, personalised medical monitoring."
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