Wearable sensor points to personalised medicine

To that end, Caltech engineers have developed a technique for inkjet printing arrays of nanoparticles that enables the mass production of long-lasting wearable sweat sensors to monitor a variety of biomarkers - such as vitamins, hormones, metabolites, and medications in real time - providing patients and their doctors with the ability to continually follow changes in the levels of those molecules.

Wearable biosensors that incorporate the new nanoparticles have been used to monitor metabolites in patients suffering from long COVID and the levels of chemotherapy drugs in cancer patients at City of Hope in Duarte, California.

"These are just two examples of what is possible," said Wei Gao, a professor of medical engineering in Caltech’s Andrew and Peggy Cherng Department of Medical Engineering. "There are many chronic conditions and their biomarkers that these sensors now give us the possibility to monitor continuously and noninvasively."

In a paper published in Nature Materials, corresponding author Gao and his team describe the nanoparticles as core–shell cubic nanoparticles.