Wearable Electrochemical Sensors for the Monitoring and Screening of Drugs

Abstract

Wearable electrochemical sensors capable of noninvasive monitoring of chemical markers represent a rapidly emerging digital-health technology. Recent advances toward wearable continuous glucose monitoring (CGM) systems have ignited tremendous interest in expanding such sensor technology to other important fields. This article reviews for the first time wearable electrochemical sensors for monitoring therapeutic drugs and drugs of abuse. This rapidly emerging class of drug-sensing wearable devices addresses the growing demand for personalized medicine, toward improved therapeutic outcomes while minimizing the side effects of drugs and the related medical expenses. Continuous, noninvasive monitoring of therapeutic drugs within bodily fluids empowers clinicians and patients to correlate the pharmacokinetic properties with optimal outcomes by realizing patient-specific dose regulation and tracking dynamic changes in pharmacokinetics behavior while assuring the medication adherence of patients. Furthermore, wearable electrochemical drug monitoring devices can also serve as powerful screening tools in the hands of law enforcement agents to combat drug trafficking and support on-site forensic investigations. The review covers various wearable form factors developed for noninvasive monitoring of therapeutic drugs in different body fluids and toward on-site screening of drugs of abuse. The future prospects of such wearable drug monitoring devices are presented with the ultimate goals of introducing accurate real-time drug monitoring protocols and autonomous closed-loop platforms toward precise dose regulation and optimal therapeutic outcomes. Finally, current unmet challenges and existing gaps are discussed for motivating future technological innovations regarding personalized therapy. The current pace of developments and the tremendous market opportunities for such wearable drug monitoring platforms are expected to drive intense future research and commercialization efforts.

Highly Concentrated, Conductive, Defect-free Graphene Ink for Screen-Printed Sensor Application

“…Wearable chemical sensor technology has rapidly developed in recent years with applications in personalized healthcare, fitness management, and medical diagnostics because it provides continuous and real-time physiological information with regard to health status changes to the wearer [1][2][3][4][5]. A wearable wireless sensor device typically contains the following key functional units: a substrate, active materials, and an integrated circuit module [6,7].…”

Wearable electrochemical biosensors in North America

“…While the field of diabetes care remains to be the major focus, seeking for innovations mainly toward developing miniaturized CGM wearables with longer life span, self-powered and multiplexed sensing ability, major efforts will be directed to translate the wearable chemical sensing technology to other important fields with huge potential markets. Therapeutic drug monitoring (TDM) using wearables has already attracted lots of interest (Teymourian et al, 2020c), owing to the aging population and the high prevalence of drugs, and we expect to see first commercial TDM wearables during the forecast period. Fitness monitoring, personalized nutrition, and security monitoring are other fields expected to take some share in the growing market of wearable chemical sensors.…”

“…While tedious, conventional TDM is crucial for safely administering drugs that have a narrow therapeutic range or highly intervariable pharmacokinetics, such as lithium, L-Dopa, and phenytoin. Drug concentrations in sweat and ISF often correlate well with that of plasma or serum, and there is a major opportunity in applying wearable electrochemical sensors to make TDM cheaper, less invasive, and more accessible (Kovacs et al, 1998;Tai et al, 2018;Teymourian et al, 2020c). As an example, a wearable electrochemical microneedle sensor has been developed for the continuous monitoring of L-Dopa toward the effective management of Parkinson's disease (Goud et al, 2019).…”

Recent Advances in the Fabrication and Functionalization of Flexible Optical Biosensors: Toward Smart Life-Sciences Applications

“…For this reason, flexible nanoplasmonic is rapidly evolving in optomechanics, which combines theoretical physics with optics and material sciences [55,56]. Moreover, these platforms find applications in many other research fields, such as homeland security (i.e., drugs [57] and explosives [58,59] detection), seismology [60], and plant biology [61].…”