Tandem metabolic reaction-based sensors unlock in vivo metabolomics.

Mimicking metabolic pathways on electrodes enables in vivo metabolite monitoring for decoding metabolism. Conventional in vivo sensors cannot accommodate underlying complex reactions involving multiple enzymes and cofactors, addressing only a fraction of enzymatic reactions for few metabolites. We devised a single-wall-carbon-nanotube-electrode architecture supporting tandem metabolic pathway-like reactions linkable to oxidoreductase-based electrochemical analysis, making a vast majority of metabolites detectable in vivo.

Rapidly self-healing electronic skin for machine learning-assisted physiological and movement evaluation.

Emerging electronic skins (E-Skins) offer continuous, real-time electrophysiological monitoring. However, daily mechanical scratches compromise their functionality, underscoring urgent need for self-healing E-Skins resistant to mechanical damage. Current materials have slow recovery times, impeding reliable signal measurement.

Mechanistic and data-driven modeling of carbon respiration with bio-electrochemical sensors.

Bioelectrochemical sensor (BES) technologies have been developed to measure soluble carbon concentrations in wastewater. However, architectures and analytical methods developed in controlled laboratory environments fail to predict BES behavior during field deployments at water resource recovery facilities (WRRFs). Here, we examine the possibilities and obstacles associated with integrating BESs into environmental sensing networks and machine learning algorithms to monitor the biodegradable carbon dynamics and microbial metabolism at WRRFs.

Integrating Bio-Electrochemical Sensors and Machine Learning to Predict the Efficacy of Biological Nutrient Removal Processes at Water Resource Recovery Facilities.

Monitoring biological nutrient removal (BNR) processes at water resource recovery facilities (WRRFs) with data-driven models is currently limited by the data limitations associated with the variability of bioavailable carbon (C) in wastewater. This study focuses on leveraging the amperometric response of a bio-electrochemical sensor (BES) to wastewater C variability, to predict influent shock loading events and NO removal in the first-stage anoxic zone (ANX1) of a five-stage Bardenpho BNR process using machine learning (ML) methods. Shock loading prediction with BES signal processing successfully detected 86.

Integrated Agricultural Practices and Engineering Technologies Enhance Synergies of Food-Energy-Water Systems in Corn Belt Watersheds.

Interconnected food, energy, water systems (FEWS) require systems level understanding to design efficient and effective management strategies and policies that address potentially competing challenges of production and environmental quality. Adoption of agricultural best management practices (BMPs) can reduce nonpoint source phosphorus (P) loads, but there are also opportunities to recover P from point sources, which could also reduce demand for mineral P fertilizer derived from declining geologic reserves. Here, we apply the Integrated Technology-Environment-Economics Model to investigate the consequences of watershed-scale portfolios of agricultural BMPs and environmental and biological technologies (EBTs) for co-benefits of FEWS in Corn Belt watersheds.

Skin-interfaced electronics: A promising and intelligent paradigm for personalized healthcare.

Skin-interfaced electronics (skintronics) have received considerable attention due to their thinness, skin-like mechanical softness, excellent conformability, and multifunctional integration. Current advancements in skintronics have enabled health monitoring and digital medicine. Particularly, skintronics offer a personalized platform for early-stage disease diagnosis and treatment.

A Breathable, Passive-Cooling, Non-Inflammatory, and Biodegradable Aerogel Electronic Skin for Wearable Physical-Electrophysiological-Chemical Analysis.

Real-time monitoring of human health can be significantly improved by designing novel electronic skin (E-skin) platforms that mimic the characteristics and sensitivity of human skin. A high-quality E-skin platform that can simultaneously monitor multiple physiological and metabolic biomarkers without introducing skin discomfort or irritation is an unmet medical need. Conventional E-skins are either monofunctional or made from elastomeric films that do not include key synergistic features of natural skin, such as multi-sensing, breathability, and thermal management capabilities in a single patch.

Soft strain-insensitive bioelectronics featuring brittle materials.

Advancing electronics to interact with tissue necessitates meeting material constraints in electrochemical, electrical, and mechanical domains simultaneously. Clinical bioelectrodes with established electrochemical functionalities are rigid and mechanically mismatched with tissue. Whereas conductive materials with tissue-like softness and stretchability are demonstrated, when applied to electrochemically probe tissue, their performance is distorted by strain and corrosion.

Ferrobotic swarms enable accessible and adaptable automated viral testing.

Expanding our global testing capacity is critical to preventing and containing pandemics. Accordingly, accessible and adaptable automated platforms that in decentralized settings perform nucleic acid amplification tests resource-efficiently are required. Pooled testing can be extremely efficient if the pooling strategy is based on local viral prevalence; however, it requires automation, small sample volume handling and feedback not available in current bulky, capital-intensive liquid handling technologies.

Wearable microneedle-based electrochemical aptamer biosensing for precision dosing of drugs with narrow therapeutic windows.

Therapeutic drug monitoring is essential for dosing pharmaceuticals with narrow therapeutic windows. Nevertheless, standard methods are imprecise and involve invasive/resource-intensive procedures with long turnaround times. Overcoming these limitations, we present a microneedle-based electrochemical aptamer biosensing patch (μNEAB-patch) that minimally invasively probes the interstitial fluid (ISF) and renders correlated, continuous, and real-time measurements of the circulating drugs' pharmacokinetics.

Mapping the National Phosphorus Recovery Potential from Centralized Wastewater and Corn Ethanol Infrastructure.

Anthropogenic discharge of excess phosphorus (P) to water bodies and increasingly stringent discharge limits have fostered interest in quantifying opportunities for P recovery and reuse. To date, geospatial estimates of P recovery potential in the United States (US) have used human and livestock population data, which do not capture the engineering constraints of P removal from centralized water resource recovery facilities (WRRFs) and corn ethanol biorefineries where P is concentrated in coproduct animal feeds. Here, renewable P (rP) estimates from plant-wide process models were used to create a geospatial inventory of recovery potential for centralized WRRFs and biorefineries, revealing that individual corn ethanol biorefineries can generate on average 3 orders of magnitude more rP than WRRFs per site, and all corn ethanol biorefineries can generate nearly double the total rP of WRRFs across the US.

A touch-based multimodal and cryptographic bio-human-machine interface.

The awareness of individuals’ biological status is critical for creating interactive and adaptive environments that can actively assist the users to achieve optimal outcomes. Accordingly, specialized human–machine interfaces—equipped with bioperception and interpretation capabilities—are required. To this end, we devised a multimodal cryptographic bio-human–machine interface (CB-HMI), which seamlessly translates the user’s touch-based entries into encrypted biochemical, biophysical, and biometric indices.

Epidermis-Inspired Wearable Piezoresistive Pressure Sensors Using Reduced Graphene Oxide Self-Wrapped Copper Nanowire Networks.

Wearable piezoresistive sensors are being developed as electronic skins (E-skin) for broad applications in human physiological monitoring and soft robotics. Tactile sensors with sufficient sensitivities, durability, and large dynamic ranges are required to replicate this critical component of the somatosensory system. Multiple micro/nanostructures, materials, and sensing modalities have been reported to address this need.

Wearable aptamer-field-effect transistor sensing system for noninvasive cortisol monitoring.

Wearable technologies for personalized monitoring require sensors that track biomarkers often present at low levels. Cortisol—a key stress biomarker—is present in sweat at low nanomolar concentrations. Previous wearable sensing systems are limited to analytes in the micromolar-millimolar ranges.

Harnessing the Wide-range Strain Sensitivity of Bilayered PEDOT:PSS Films for Wearable Health Monitoring.

Mechanical deformation of human skin provides essential information about human motions, muscle stretching, vocal fold vibration, and heart rates. Monitoring these activities requires the measurement of strains at different levels. Herein, we report a wearable wide-range strain sensor based on conducting polymer poly(3,4-ethylenedioxythiophene) polystyrene sulfonate (PEDOT:PSS).

Gelatin methacryloyl-based tactile sensors for medical wearables.

Gelatin methacryloyl (GelMA) is a widely used hydrogel with skin-derived gelatin acting as the main constituent. However, GelMA has not been used in the development of wearable biosensors, which are emerging devices that enable personalized healthcare monitoring. This work highlights the potential of GelMA for wearable biosensing applications by demonstrating a fully solution-processable and transparent capacitive tactile sensor with microstructured GelMA as the core dielectric layer.

An autonomous wearable system for diurnal sweat biomarker data acquisition.

To track dynamically varying and physiologically relevant biomarker profiles in sweat, autonomous wearable platforms are required to periodically sample and analyze sweat with minimal or no user intervention. Previously reported sweat sensors are functionally limited to capturing biomarker information at one time-point/period, thereby necessitating repeated user intervention to increase the temporal granularity of biomarker data. Accordingly, we present a compact multi-compartment wearable system, where each compartment can be activated to autonomously induce/modulate sweat secretion (via iontophoretic actuation) and analyze sweat at set time points.

Microengineered poly(HEMA) hydrogels for wearable contact lens biosensing.

Microchannels in hydrogels play an essential role in enabling a smart contact lens. However, microchannels have rarely been created in commercial hydrogel contact lenses due to their sensitivity to conventional microfabrication techniques. Here, we report the fabrication of microchannels in poly(2-hydroxyethyl methacrylate) (poly(HEMA)) hydrogels that are used in commercial contact lenses with a three-dimensional (3D) printed mold.

A ferrobotic system for automated microfluidic logistics.

Automated technologies that can perform massively parallelized and sequential fluidic operations at small length scales can resolve major bottlenecks encountered in various fields, including medical diagnostics, -omics, drug development, and chemical/material synthesis. Inspired by the transformational impact of automated guided vehicle systems on manufacturing, warehousing, and distribution industries, we devised a ferrobotic system that uses a network of individually addressable robots, each performing designated micro-/nanofluid manipulation-based tasks in cooperation with other robots toward a shared objective. The underlying robotic mechanism facilitating fluidic operations was realized by addressable electromagnetic actuation of miniature mobile magnets that exert localized magnetic body forces on aqueous droplets filled with biocompatible magnetic nanoparticles.

Noninvasive wearable electroactive pharmaceutical monitoring for personalized therapeutics.

To achieve the mission of personalized medicine, centering on delivering the right drug to the right patient at the right dose, therapeutic drug monitoring solutions are necessary. In that regard, wearable biosensing technologies, capable of tracking drug pharmacokinetics in noninvasively retrievable biofluids (e.g.

A wearable freestanding electrochemical sensing system.

To render high-fidelity wearable biomarker data, understanding and engineering the information delivery pathway from epidermally retrieved biofluid to a readout unit are critical. By examining the biomarker information delivery pathway and recognizing near-zero strained regions within a microfluidic device, a strain-isolated pathway to preserve biomarker data fidelity is engineered. Accordingly, a generalizable and disposable freestanding electrochemical sensing system (FESS) is devised, which simultaneously facilitates sensing and out-of-plane signal interconnection with the aid of double-sided adhesion.

Design Framework and Sensing System for Noninvasive Wearable Electroactive Drug Monitoring.

Wearable drug monitoring targeting epidermally retrievable biofluids (e.g., sweat) can enable a variety of applications, including drug compliance/abuse monitoring and personalized therapeutic drug dosing.

A 3D-printed microfluidic-enabled hollow microneedle architecture for transdermal drug delivery.

Embedding microfluidic architectures with microneedles enables fluid management capabilities that present new degrees of freedom for transdermal drug delivery. To this end, fabrication schemes that can simultaneously create and integrate complex millimeter/centimeter-long microfluidic structures and micrometer-scale microneedle features are necessary. Accordingly, three-dimensional (3D) printing techniques are suitable candidates because they allow the rapid realization of customizable yet intricate microfluidic and microneedle features.