Modeling and Fundamental Design Considerations for Portable, Wearable and Implantable Electronic Biosensors

Chronic diseases such as cancer, diabetes, acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS), etc. are leading causes of mortality all over the world. Portable, wearable and implantable biosensors can go a long way in preventing these premature deaths by frequent or continuous self-monitoring of vital health parameters. Integration of different laboratory operations, such as mixing, sorting, transport and sensing (conducted to perform biomedical testing) onto a chip will allow development of portable hand-held diagnostic devices. In addition, if these device are flexible and/or bio-compatible, then these could either be worn as part of clothing or implanted into body for continuous health monitoring. While considerable work has been done to evaluate and enhance sensing performance of classical diagnostic devices, electrical sensing properties of miniaturized portable, wearable and implantable diagnostic devices remain poorly understood. Thus, the need of the hour is to come up with a predictive theoretical framework that can provide design guidelines to improve the sensing performance of these devices. Towards this goal, we explore the physics and interpret experiments: 1) to manipulate small droplets for lab-on-chip portable sensors, 2) to improve the sensing performance of transition-metal dichalcogenides based flexible wearable sensors, 3) to determine the performance trade-offs in hydrogel based implantable biochemical sensors, and 4) to develop compact models for system level integration of biosensors. The guidelines resulting from this framework can be used to design and optimize the performance of these next-generation sensors