Ann Arbor, Michigan – The University of Michigan (UM) develops wearable technologies for patients in monitoring their disease such as anemia, high blood pressure, diabetes, and lung disease.
People with chronic diseases like diabetes and heart-related ailments oftentimes visit urgent care clinics or other health facilities in monitoring their condition. Similarly, they run to emergency health departments and hospitals to get treatment when their conditions seem to worsen.
However, the wearable technologies being developed at UM would greatly help them. These sensor techs include the Apple iWatch and Google Glass. These latest health devices are expected to become tremendous, generating billions of dollars in the future.
The new sensor techs can help in detecting airborne chemicals, whether exhaled or dispersed through the skin. It would be the very first wearable sensor to detect a wide array of chemical attributes than physical. The researchers at UM are collaborating with the Innovation Corps program of the National Science Foundation in moving the said technologies from their lab to the international marketplace.
Biomedical Engineering professor Sherman Fan said that each disease has its own specific biomarker. Hence, the new sensor tech has the ability to detect specific biomarkers. For instance, the biomarker for diabetes is acetone, Fan emphasized. The new technologies would also sense abnormal levels of oxygen and nitric acid, which could lead to lung disease, anemia, and high blood pressure. These health conditions, if possible, would need an urgent care or early treatment in order to prevent complications.
The wearable technologies also have further applications besides disease monitoring. These sensors have the capacity to register any presence of hazardous chemical leaks and assess the air quality of a certain environment. Before arriving to the technological development, the researchers used a unique approach in detecting molecular charge, the “nanoelectronic sensors”. Another technique was also integrated into their work, referred to as the “heterodyne mixing”.
The new sensor technologies provide a sense of an urgent care near me facility for patients, providing noninvasive and consistent monitoring of a certain health condition. Patients who would use such tech would no longer need to run to the nearest urgent care clinic just to have their health condition monitored or regulated. Published in the Nature Communications, the tech was described as “Graphene nanoelectronic heterodyne sensor for rapid and sensitive vapour detection”. Fan believed that the new, sensor, wearable technologies will be extremely advantageous to the society.
