Capstone team wins Esch Competition with sweat-based biomedical device

Pictured above Teresa Tang, Alyssa Leon, Xinmei Yan, Paul Shen, and Kate Pearson

No need to be embarrassed about sweating, it can be beneficial for your health especially if it’s used to improve your medical treatment!

Nanotechnology Engineering (NE) Capstone Design Project Team 13 designed a sweat-sensing patch to continuously monitor medication levels in the body. Creating this novel device paved the way for their $10,000 Esch Competition win!

For maximum effectiveness, medications must be given at a precise dosage with the potential for serious side effects if the incorrect dose is delivered. Currently, blood tests are used to determine drug concentration. However, a blood test fails to provide continuous measurements.

 Team 13 members theorized that sweat is a better alternative for taking samples as it contains much of the same information that blood does about the patient’s medication levels. However, sweat can be measured continuously and non-invasively on the surface of the skin.

Identifying a need for better diagnostic methods that enable patients to monitor their own health and well-being, team members set out to develop a biomedical device. The team overcame many challenges in the process.

Designing sweat sensors is difficult because the sensors must operate with only nanolitres of sweat.  A major challenge was dealing with unexpected results when testing the device. Sweat sensors require many different components to operate.

The team spent months optimizing each of these components, but problems arose when integrating the components into one functional device. With the guidance of their supervisor, Professor John Saad, they were able to break down the problem and work through these challenges.

“Professor Saad was always willing to meet with us in the lab and share his expertise. He is enthusiastic about our ideas and vision for the project, which is a great source of motivation.”

Team members also credit their success to the NE program.

“Nanotechnology Engineering is an incredibly multidisciplinary program, with courses ranging from nanobiotechnology to nanoelectronics to nanomaterials,” said team members. “This gave us the skills necessary to design a complex product like a sweat sensor, which requires many unique components to operate. We also found that a lot of the issues faced by current sweat sensors can be addressed using nanomaterials. Our program gave us a unique perspective and mindset that allowed us to solve some of the major problems with existing sweat sensors.”

While some teammates are soon heading to graduate school and others to full-time employment they will continue to work on their device. They plan to use their Esch winnings to obtain a patent for certain aspects of the device and to develop a prototype that would expand the capabilities of the device to include other potential applications. Sweat sensors are a promising way to make continuous health monitoring more accessible.