Currently, with the rise of telemedicine and home healthcare, the collection of medical grade data has become a crucial aspect. In order to conduct accurate analysis, doctors need to understand the patient's biomarker levels (such as glucose, lactate, and cholesterol), which are typically measured through methods such as fingertip blood tests.

However, these methods are invasive and can cause discomfort and poor patient compliance. In addition, fingertip blood sampling tests can only be conducted intermittently, which may result in poor disease management outcomes.

Therefore, a non-invasive and continuous monitoring method for human biomarkers is needed. Therefore, current research generally focuses on detecting biomarkers in sweat.

However, for inactive or bedridden populations, obtaining sweat is not feasible, therefore a readily accessible, non-invasive, and continuous biomarker is needed.

 Based on this, a team led by Professor Liu Yuxin from the National University of Singapore and Yang Le from the Materials Research and Engineering Institute of the Singapore Science and Technology Research Council (who was selected for the 2023 MIT Technology Review "35 Under 35 Technology Innovators" Asia Pacific list) has developed a new biomarker category, which is called Solid Epidermal Biomarker (SEB), Stretchable ionic–electronic bilayer）， It can exist in solid form on the surface of the skin.

Solid biomarkers have been proved to be related to chronic diseases such as diabetes. However, due to the difficulty of collecting skin samples and the use of complex and expensive equipment to analyze these biomarkers, the current methods cannot be used for continuous monitoring.

 To address these issues, they hope to develop a novel wearable sensor platform for monitoring solid-state epidermal biomarkers.

Source: Sensor Expert Network