Browse Topic: Fluids and secretions
Mini organs are incomplete without blood vessels. To facilitate systematic studies and ensure meaningful comparisons with living organisms, a network of perfusable blood vessels and capillaries must be created — in a way that is precisely controllable and reproducible. A team has established a method using ultrashort laser pulses to create tiny blood vessels in a rapid and reproducible manner. Experiments show that these vessels behave just like those in living tissue. Liver lobules have been created on a chip with great success.
A pacemaker is a small device that helps control your heartbeat so you can return to your normal life. It has three main parts: a pulse generator that creates electrical signals, a controller-monitor that manages these signals, and leads that deliver the signals to the heart. One key benefit of the pacemaker is its strong titanium casing. Titanium is very strong and lightweight, and it is biocompatible, meaning it works well with the body without causing harmful reactions. This metal is highly resistant to corrosion, which helps keep the casing intact and protective even when exposed to bodily fluids.
Researchers developed wearable skin sensors that can detect what’s in a person’s sweat. Using the sensors, monitoring perspiration could bypass the need for more invasive procedures like blood draws and provide real-time updates on health problems such as dehydration or fatigue. The sensor design can be rapidly manufactured using a roll-to-roll processing technique that essentially prints the sensors onto a sheet of plastic.
Using an array of tiny needles that are almost too small to see, researchers have developed a minimally invasive technique for sampling a largely unexplored human bodily fluid that could potentially provide a new source of information for routine clinical monitoring and diagnostic testing.
University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia
Every year, more than 5 million people in the United States are diagnosed with heart valve disease, but this condition has no effective long-term treatment. When a person’s heart valve is severely damaged by a birth defect, lifestyle, or aging, blood flow is disrupted. If left untreated, there can be fatal complications.
Researchers have developed a pacifier designed to monitor a baby’s electrolyte levels in real time, potentially eliminating the need for repeated invasive blood draws. The team constructed a tiny tunnel, or microfluidic channel, into the body of the pacifier.
Bladder cancer has a cure rate of over 90 percent when detected early, but it has a high recurrence rate of 70 percent, necessitating continuous monitoring. Late detection often requires major surgeries such as bladder removal followed by artificial bladder implantation or the use of a urine pouch, significantly lowering the patient’s quality of life. However, existing urine test kits have low sensitivity, and cystoscopy, which involves inserting a catheter into the urethra for internal bladder examination, is both painful and burdensome. This highlights the urgent need for a simple yet accurate diagnostic technology for patients.
A study at Mayo Clinic suggests that an hourglass-shaped stent could improve blood flow and ease severe and reoccurring chest pain in people with microvascular disease. Of 30 participants in a phase 2 clinical trial, 76 percent saw improvement in their day-to-day life. For example, some participants who reported not being able to walk around the block or up a flight of stairs without chest pain were able to do these ordinary physical activities at the end of a 120-day period.
A new handheld, sound-based diagnostic system can deliver precise results in an hour with a mere finger prick of blood. The researchers used tiny particles they call functional negative acoustic contrast particles (fNACPs) and a custom-built, handheld instrument or acoustic pipette that delivers sound waves to the blood samples inside.
A silicone membrane for wearable devices is more comfortable and breathable thanks to better-sized pores made with the help of citric acid crystals. The new preparation technique fabricates thin, silicone-based patches that rapidly wick water away from the skin. The technique could reduce the redness and itching caused by wearable biosensors that trap sweat beneath them. The technique was developed by bioengineer and professor Young-Ho Cho and his colleagues at KAIST and reported in the journal Scientific Reports.
A flexible and stretchable cell has been developed for wearable electronic devices that require a reliable and efficient energy source that can easily be integrated into the human body. Conductive material consisting of carbon nanotubes, crosslinked polymers, and enzymes joined by stretchable connectors, are directly printed onto the material through screenprinting.
I’m guessing that when you think about applications for AI, physical fitness is not the first thing that comes to mind. But it is actually one of the more common applications. The most popular fitness sensors use AI to keep track of how many steps you’ve taken, track your progress, and integrate that with health information like heartrate or even blood oxygen level. But AI can do much more than that.
A new coronavirus test can get accurate results from a saliva sample in less than 30 minutes, researchers report in the journal Nature Communications. Many of the components of the handheld device used in this technology can be 3D printed, and the test can detect as little as one viral particle per 1-μL drop of fluid.
A wearable health monitor can reliably measure levels of important biochemicals in sweat during physical exercise. The 3D-printed monitor could someday provide a simple and non-invasive way to track health conditions and diagnose common diseases, such as diabetes, gout, kidney disease or heart disease.
UCSD San Diego, CA
A unique wristwatch contains multiple modules, including a sensor array, a microfluidic chip, signal processing, and a data display system to monitor chemicals in human sweat. It can continuously and accurately monitor the levels of potassium (K+), sodium (Na+), and calcium (Ca2+) ions.
Scientists at Osaka University, in cooperation with Joanneum Research (Weiz, Austria), have introduced wireless health monitoring patches that use embedded piezoelectric nanogenerators to power themselves with harvested biomechanical energy. This work may lead to new autonomous health sensors as well as battery-less wearable electronic devices.
For decades, people with diabetes have relied on finger pricks to withdraw blood or adhesive microneedles to measure and manage their glucose levels. In addition to being painful, these methods can cause itching, inflammation and infection.
Monitoring the success of surgery on blood vessels is challenging, as the first sign of trouble often comes too late. By that time, the patient often needs additional surgery that carries risks similar to the original procedure. A new device could make it easier for doctors to monitor the success of blood vessel surgery.
Tubing for wound draining is an essential medical component used to manage the drainage of fluids from surgical or traumatic wounds. This tubing is commonly employed after surgical procedures to facilitate the removal of excess fluids (such as blood or serous fluid) from the wound site, or in traumatic Injuries where there is a need to control and remove fluids to aid in the healing process. Other uses include draining abscesses or fluid collections, helping to prevent infection, and promote faster healing, or to manage fluid accumulation in body cavities, preventing complications like seromas or hematomas. By removing excess fluids, tubing promotes a cleaner wound environment, which is conducive to faster healing.
Researchers have invented sensor-based noninvasive medical devices to make the monitoring and treatment of certain physiological and psychological conditions timelier and more precise.
Researchers have developed an integrated microfluidic chip (BSI-AST chip) for rapid AST from positive blood cultures (PBCs). Using the chip, the process from bacteria extraction to getting AST results takes less than 3.5 hours, thus promising to be a powerful new tool in managing bloodstream infections.
Made with a laser-modified graphene nanocomposite material, a wearable device can detect specific glucose levels in sweat for three weeks while simultaneously monitoring body temperature and pH levels.
A Northwestern University research team has developed a revolutionary transistor that is expected be ideal for lightweight, flexible, high-performance bioelectronics. The electrochemical transistor is compatible with blood and water and can amplify important signals.
Our brains contain an intricate network of arteries that carry blood throughout the organ along winding paths. For neurosurgeons, following these paths with a wire — which is just a third of a millimeter in diameter and enters the body through the femoral artery — to reach an obstructed blood vessel can be tricky. For instance, if they want to point the wire in a different direction, they often have to pull the instrument out and then reinsert it, lengthening surgery times and increasing the risk of complications.
Engineers at the University of California San Diego developed a soft and stretchy ultrasound patch that can be worn on the skin to monitor blood flow through major arteries and veins deep inside a person’s body.
Researchers have reported a sustainable, insoluble, and chiral photonic cellulose nanocrystal patch for calcium ion (Ca2+) sensing in sweat.
Wearable wireless biosensors are an integral part of digital healthcare and monitoring. Commonly used chipless resonant antenna-based biosensors are simple and affordable but have limited applicability due to their low sensitivity. Now, researchers from Japan have developed a novel, wireless, parity–time symmetry-based bioresonator that can detect minute concentrations of tear glucose and blood lactate. This highly sensitive, tunable, and robust bioresonator has the potential to have a great impact on personalized health monitoring and digitized healthcare systems.
A Rutgers-led team of researchers has developed a microchip that can measure stress hormones in real time from a drop of blood. The study appears in the journal Science Advances.
An electrochemical sensor detects Parkinson’s disease at different stages. The device was fabricated using an ordinary 3D printer and proved capable of early diagnosis, also serving as a model for the identification of other diseases. The sensor rapidly indicates the level of the protein PARK7/DJ-1 in human blood and synthetic cerebrospinal fluid. The molecule is associated with Parkinson’s at levels below 40 μg/L.
Sweat contains biomarkers that help doctors make health diagnoses. Wearable sensors can be used to monitor a person’s perspiration rate and provide information about the skin, nervous system activity, and underlying health conditions. But not all sweat is created equal, and some cannot be measured with current sensors. A newly developed superhydrophobic biosensor could be used as a diagnostic tool to detect such types of sweat.
Imagine a T-shirt that could analyze sweat, potentially alerting the wearer to any health abnormalities. Well, this is now closer to reality thanks to a research group’s recent innovation. Fibers and fabrics are ever present in our daily lives, and their origins are intertwined with the history of human civilization. While progress has been made, much remains unchanged for fibers and fabrics.
Researchers have developed a portable sensor made of simple materials to detect heavy metals in sweat, which is easily sampled. The sensor is simple in terms of the materials used to make it and the stages of its production. The base of the device is polyethylene terephthalate (PET), on top of which is a conductive flexible copper adhesive tape with the sensor printed on it, and a protective layer of nail varnish or spray. The exposed copper is removed by immersion in ferric chloride solution for 20 minutes, followed by washing in distilled water to promote the necessary corrosion.
Cardiovascular diseases account for 32 percent of global deaths. Myocardial infarction, or heart attacks, play a large part in heart diseases and the necrosis of cardiac tissue after blood supply is decreased or stopped.
There are about 64 million cases of heart failure worldwide. According to the American Heart Association, 6.2 million adults in the United States have heart failure and that number is estimated to increase to 8 million by 2030. Heart failure is a progressive clinical syndrome characterized by a structural abnormality of the heart, in which the heart is unable to pump sufficient blood to meet the body’s requirements.
Engineers at the University of California San Diego have developed a thin, flexible, stretchy sweat sensor that can show the level of glucose, lactate, sodium, or pH of your sweat — at the press of a finger. It is the first standalone wearable device that allows the sensor to operate independently — sans any wired or wireless connection to external devices — to directly visualize the measurement’s results.
Researchers in Japan have developed the first wearable devices to precisely monitor jaundice, a yellowing of the skin caused by elevated bilirubin levels in the blood that can cause severe medical conditions in newborns. Jaundice can be treated easily by irradiating the infant with blue light that breaks bilirubin down to be excreted through urine. The treatment itself, however, can disrupt bonding time, cause dehydration, and increase the risks of allergic diseases. Neonatal jaundice is one of the leading causes of death and brain damage in infants in low- and middle-income countries.
More than 400 million people worldwide suffer from diabetes. For them, the ability to measure blood glucose levels non-invasively (without piercing the skin) would be an enormous relief. Thanks to a patented development by DiaMonTech AG, this dream could soon become reality for many people. The technology, which uses an infrared quantum cascade laser, is already available as a desktop device. But a smartphone-sized instrument is soon to follow.
Using an array of tiny needles that are almost too small to see, researchers have developed a minimally invasive technique for sampling a largely unexplored human bodily fluid that could potentially provide a new source of information for routine clinical monitoring and diagnostic testing.
Researchers at the University of Bath working in collaboration with industrial partner, Integrated Graphene, have developed a new sensing technique based on graphene foam for the detection of glucose levels in the blood. Since it is a chemical sensor instead of being enzyme-based, the new technology is robust, has a long shelf-life and can be tuned to detect lower glucose concentrations than current systems.
Scientists used photoelectrochemical measurement and x-ray photoelectron spectroscopy to clarify the source of titanium’s biocompatibility when implanted into the body, as with hip replacements and dental implants. They find that its reactivity with the correct ions in the extracellular fluid allows the body to recognize it. This work may lead to a new generation of medical implants that last longer.
Engineers have created a flexible electronic sensing patch that can be sewn into clothing to analyze sweat for multiple markers. The patch could be used to diagnose and monitor acute and chronic health conditions or to monitor health during athletic or workplace performance. The device consists of special sensing threads, flexible electronic components, and wireless connectivity for real-time data acquisition, storage, and processing.
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