Wearable Biosensors towards Healthcare Decentralization

Date: 2021/08/09 - 2021/08/09

Academic Seminar: Wearable Biosensors towards Healthcare Decentralization

Speaker: Dr. Hnin Yin Yin Nyein, postdoctoral scholar at the Stanford University

Time: 9:00 a.m.-10:00 a.m., August 11th, 2021 (Beijing Time)

Location: via Feishu

Abstract

The rather reactive and centralized medical approaches in today’s healthcare system prevent individuals from obtaining diagnosis and treatment in a timely and accessible manner. Digital transformation in healthcare, enabled by point-of-care (POC) devices at the frontend, is needed to shift toward a preventive and proactive care model. Presently, commercially available devices for remote health monitoring are majorly limited to body’s vitals and glucose levels, limiting access to healthcare. To this end, I developed a variety of biosensors for wearables and POC testing. In this seminar, I will address two major challenges in biosensors - 1) realizing an autonomous device by integrating flexible electronics and solid-state electrochemical sensors in a single robust platform and 2) achieving sensitive, uniform detection for reliable analyte quantifications. Specifically, the wearable ultralow-volume sweat sensors makes sweat a viable mode of health monitoring at the molecular level across activities, whether active or sedentary, and across user groups, whether young or old, healthy or ill. By using the sensors, I showed that continuous sweat analysis can be done to study how the body’s endogenous and stimulated sweating response relates to stress, metabolic conditions, and potentially neurological afflictions through multiplexed quantification of ions, metabolites, and drugs. I have also enabled POC and diagnostic testing to a broader class of biomolecules such as drugs, cytokines and proteins detection. I developed a method to enable uniform one-point calibration sensors and achieved multiplexed detection of biochemicals at significantly different concentrations.

Biography

Hnin Yin Yin Nyein is currently a postdoctoral scholar at the Stanford University. She earned her PhD in materials science and engineering from the University of California, Berkeley in 2020. Her research focus includes wearable bioelectronics, personalized medicine, precision medicine, microfluidics, and soft condensed matter.