Monitoring
of the hemostasis status is essential for therapeutic
anticoagulants, undergoing surgery, cardiovascular diseases, etc.
Although the clinical values of conventional blood coagulation tests
have been well demonstrated, these devices have limitations such as
large and expensive equipment, excessive sample volumes, long turnaround
times, and difficulty in miniaturization for point-of-care use. Here,
we present a novel strategy to evaluate blood hemostasis using the
single-port Love-mode surface acoustic wave (SLSAW) sensor. The SLSAW
sensor was designed as a plug-and-play-type unit for disposable use
and operated under the harmonic resonant mode to produce frequency
response to the blood coagulation cascade. Compared with a quartz
crystal microbalance, Lamb wave, and film bulk acoustic resonator,
the frequency shift of SLSAW was significantly increased, ranging
from approximately 8960 to 10 368 kHz, which indicated enhancement
of the signal-to-noise ratio. To demonstrate the feasibility of the
SLSAW, studies were carried out to examine the effects of temperature
and clotting reagents on coagulation times and kinetics. Activated
partial thromboplastin times of plasma were validated by comparing
with SYSMEX CA-7000 with the correlation (R
2) as 0.996. In terms of coagulation kinetics, reaction time, clot
formation time, maximum frequency shift, and clot formation rate of
whole blood correlated well with corresponding parameters of the standard
thromboelastography (TEG) analyzer (R
2 = 0.9942, 0.9868, 0.9712, and 0.9939, respectively). The SLSAW sensor,
with the advantages of low cost, small size, little sample consumption
(1 μL), disposable use, and simple operation, is a promising
tool for point-of-care diagnosis of hemostasis.