Abstract

Towards Wearable Real-Time Clinical Monitoring Using Microfluidic Devices

Martyn Boutelle, Professor of Biomedical Sensors Engineering, Imperial College London

Modern acute critical care medicine is increasingly seeking to protect vulnerable tissue from damage by monitoring the patterns of physical, electrical and chemical changes taking place in tissue – so called multimodal monitoring. Such patterns of molecular changes offer the exciting possibility of allowing clinicians to detect changes in patient condition and to guide therapy on an individualized basis in real time. Microfluidic lab-on-chip devices coupled to tissue sampling using microdialysis provide an important new way for measuring real-time chemical changes as the low volume flow rates of microdialysis probes are ideally matched to the length scales of microfluidic devices. In this presentation, I will describe the combination of miniature electrochemical sensors and biosensors with 3D printed microfluidic devices for transplant organ and patient monitoring. Concentrations of key biomarker molecules can then be determined continuously using either optically or electrochemically, using amperometric, potentiometic and array sensors.  Wireless devices allow analysis to take place close to the patient. Droplet-based microfluidics, by digitizing the dialysis stream into discrete low volume samples, both minimizes dispersion allowing very rapid concentration changes to be measured, and allows rapid transport of samples between patient and analysis chip. This talk will overview successful design, optimization, automatic-calibration and use of both continuous flow and droplet-based microfluidic analysis systems for real-time clinical monitoring, using clinical examples from our recent work.