Wireless, intraoral hybrid electronics for real-time quantification of sodium intake toward hypertension management

Abstract

Recent wearable devices offer portable monitoring of biopotentials, heart rate, or physical activity, allowing for active management of human health and wellness. Such systems can be inserted in the oral cavity for measuring food intake in regard to controlling eating behavior, directly related to diseases such as hypertension, diabetes, and obesity. However, existing devices using plastic circuit boards and rigid sensors are not ideal for oral insertion. A user-comfortable system for the oral cavity requires an ultrathin, low-profile, and soft electronic platform along with miniaturized sensors. Here, we introduce a stretchable hybrid electronic system that has an exceptionally small form factor, enabling a long-range wireless monitoring of sodium intake. Computational study of flexible mechanics and soft materials provides fundamental aspects of key design factors for a tissue-friendly configuration, incorporating a stretchable circuit and sensor. Analytical calculation and experimental study enables reliable wireless circuitry that accommodates dynamic mechanical stress. Systematic in vitro modeling characterizes the functionality of a sodium sensor in the electronics. In vivo demonstration with human subjects captures the device feasibility for real-time quantification of sodium intake, which can be used to manage hypertension.

All‐in‐One, Wireless, Stretchable Hybrid Electronics for Smart, Connected, and Ambulatory Physiological Monitoring

“…ECG-derived heart rate (HR) and respiratory rate (RR) along with the onboard motion sensor provide valuable and critical set of physiological information without compromising device's formfactor. [24,25] Details of the fabrication process are described in the Supporting Information ( Figure S1 and Note S1), and the description of the circuit design and the chip components can be found in the Supporting Information ( Figure S2 and Table S1). Since a skin-conformal, low-modulus elastomer has shown negligible skin irritation, [19,20] three gold ECG electrodes are integrated with the elastomer substrate to allow the formation of a gapless electrode-to-skin interface and obviate the need for the use of conductive gels.…”

Wireless battery-free body sensor networks using near-field-enabled clothing

“…Wireless technologies can be used to connect wearable sensors without physical constraints. In particular, radio-based wireless communication methods, such as Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, are widely used to enable sensors to wirelessly communicate around the body for monitoring health and providing real-time clinical notifications 11,[17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24] . Unlike wired interconnects, however, these radio-based technologies require each sensor to be separately powered, typically using rigid batteries or bulky energy harvesters.…”

Fully portable and wireless universal brain–machine interfaces enabled by flexible scalp electronics and deep learning algorithm

“…This electrode acts as a driven bias, therefore its ability to capture EEG is out of the scope of this paper and not tested. The SKINTRONICS wireless telemetry unit uses a Bluetooth low-energy microcontroller (nRF52832, Nordic Semiconductor) due to its high throughput, low latency, low power draw and wireless range 39 . The BLE protocol supports wireless synchronization of multiple devices to support greater numbers of channels 50 .…”

“…The miniaturized, multi-channel flexible electronic system (Fig. 1c), encapsulated in a soft elastomeric membrane, was fabricated by using the combination of microfabrication techniques 38 , material transfer printing 38 , and hard-soft component integration 39 (details in Methods; Fig. S2 and S3).…”