Fluid Characterisation Using Microfluidic Impedance Spectroscopy for Remote Health Monitoring
type: CreativeWork
description: Remote health monitoring (RHM) will play a crucial role in the development of preventative and personalised healthcare, which must be adopted in the near future to adapt to the globally growing and ageing population. The ability to continuously monitor patients will enable more accurate diagnosis, real-time disease tracking and better patient outcomes. Continuous monitoring could also provide performance advantages to athletes and wellness benefits to all. Sweat is an important and useful biofluid that contains a wealth of information about a person’s physical and mental state. Sweat can be sampled non-invasively, making it an excellent candidate for RHM. The availability of a low-cost, portable device capable of continually determining the concentration of multiple key biomarkers in sweat, including electrolytes and metabolites, is a substantial hurdle for RHM. This is an active area of research, and most sensors in the literature use either colorimetric or electrochemical detection. Colorimetric sensors use the colour change of a sensing element. The user must, for example, take a photograph on their mobile phone, making the sensing non-continuous and adding a potential source of error. Electrochemical sensors require specific chemicals that undergo a redox reaction with each target biomarker. Development of such chemicals can be complex, and their cost and limited shelf-life and working lifetime can be prohibitive. Therefore, despite many sweat sensors being under development in the literature, currently no sensors capable of continuously monitoring the concentration of multiple sweat analytes are available on the market. In contrast, impedance spectroscopy is capable of directly probing the electrical properties of the fluid, removing the intermediate steps inherent in colorimetric and electrochemical methods. In this work, a microfluidic device is proposed with integrated interdigitated electrodes produced using aerosol-jet printing, a novel additive manufactur…
abstract: Remote health monitoring (RHM) will play a crucial role in the development of preventative and personalised healthcare, which must be adopted in the near future to adapt to the globally growing and ageing population. The ability to continuously monitor patients will enable more accurate diagnosis, real-time disease tracking and better patient outcomes. Continuous monitoring could also provide performance advantages to athletes and wellness benefits to all. Sweat is an important and useful biofluid that contains a wealth of information about a person’s physical and mental state. Sweat can be sampled non-invasively, making it an excellent candidate for RHM. The availability of a low-cost, portable device capable of continually determining the concentration of multiple key biomarkers in sweat, including electrolytes and metabolites, is a substantial hurdle for RHM. This is an active area of research, and most sensors in the literature use either colorimetric or electrochemical detection. Colorimetric sensors use the colour change of a sensing element. The user must, for example, take a photograph on their mobile phone, making the sensing non-continuous and adding a potential source of error. Electrochemical sensors require specific chemicals that undergo a redox reaction with each target biomarker. Development of such chemicals can be complex, and their cost and limited shelf-life and working lifetime can be prohibitive. Therefore, despite many sweat sensors being under development in the literature, currently no sensors capable of continuously monitoring the concentration of multiple sweat analytes are available on the market. In contrast, impedance spectroscopy is capable of directly probing the electrical properties of the fluid, removing the intermediate steps inherent in colorimetric and electrochemical methods. In this work, a microfluidic device is proposed with integrated interdigitated electrodes produced using aerosol-jet printing, a novel additive manufactur…
author: Wade, Thomas
language: eng
keywords: Impedance spectroscopy, Fluid characteisation, Microfluidics, Aerosol-jet printing, Turning point frequency, Nyquist, Interdigitated electrodes, Inflection point, ionic concentration, Electrolytes, Biofluids, Sweat sensing
license: https://apollo8-f-pro.lib.cam.ac.uk/bitstreams/088a0bb0-e744-43ce-9cd6-bebfe466ecf4/download
license: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
date published: 2024-09-15
date modified: 2026-07-22T22:24:11Z
provider: Cambridge University
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: University of Cambridge

PropertyValue
property ID: DOI
value: 10.17863/CAM.118835