CBE Seminar: Wearable Sweat Sensors for Personalized Health Monitoring

Abstract: The rising research interest in personalized and precision medicine promises to revolutionize traditional medical practices. This presents a tremendous opportunity for developing wearable devices toward predictive analytics and treatment. In this talk, I will introduce fully integrated flexible biosensors for multiplexed in-situ perspiration analysis, which can selectively and accurately measure a wide spectrum of sweat analytes (e.g., metabolites, electrolytes, heavy metals, drugs and other small molecules). This platform allows us to gain real-time insight into the sweat secretion and gland physiology. I will also demonstrate an integrated wearable sweat extraction and sensing system that can be programmed to induce sweat on demand with various secretion profiles. To demonstrate the clinical value of our wearable sweat sensing platform, human subject studies were performed for fitness monitoring, physiological monitoring, cystic fibrosis diagnosis and drug monitoring. These wearable and flexible devices open the door to a wide range of personalized monitoring and diagnostic applications.

Bio: Wei Gao is an assistant professor of medical engineering in Division of Engineering and Applied Science at the California Institute of Technology. He received his doctorate in chemical engineering at UC San Diego in 2014 as a Jacobs Fellow and HHMI International Student Research Fellow. In 2014-2017, he was a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at UC Berkeley. He is a recipient of the IEEE Sensor Council Technical Achievement Award, Sensors Young Investigator Award, MIT Technology Review 35 Innovators Under 35 (TR35) and ACS Young Investigator Award (Division of Inorganic Chemistry). His research interests include wearable devices, biosensors, flexible electronics, micro/nanorobotics and nanomedicine. For more information about Gao’s research, visit www.gao.caltech.edu/.

Host: Alon Gorodetsky