CAREER: Rationale Design of Autonomous Biomimetic Wearable Sensor for Personalized Molecular Monitoring of Long COVID

The COVID-19 pandemic has upended the lives of billions of people, spreading globally to hundreds of million cases. Recent studies show that a large number of recovered patients (even those with initially mild or no symptoms) will have prolonged post-COVID complications (long COVID). Many types of biomarker molecules in our body are reported to be closely linked to these post-COVID conditions. As the current COVID-19 pandemic remains uncontrolled around the world, there is a pressing need for developing wearable sensors to monitor an individual's health status at home. Most of the medical examinations are currently based on blood tests that require invasive blood draws and physical clinic visits. Human sweat contains a wealth of chemicals including that can reflect the body's physiological state. Compared with blood tests, sweat analyses could serve as a non-invasive and more attractive candidate for continuous health monitoring in daily life. Wearable sweat sensors could allow personalized monitoring of long-COVID-related biomarkers in people's daily activities. Such technology could help people better understand post-COVID conditions and how to treat the patients with these longer-term effects.

This project aims to develop a wearable biosensor platform that can efficiently extract and sample sweat across activities, and perform in situ, non-invasive molecular analysis of a broad spectrum of biomarkers toward personalized molecular monitoring of long COVID. This project will address multiple research challenges in the wearable sensor field. Firstly, to enable wearable monitoring of a variety of trace-level sweat biomarkers related to long COVID, a unique wearable molecular sensing strategy will be developed based on artificial bioreceptors. This biosensing approach will be optimized with both computational and experimental approaches. Secondly, considering that current wearable sweat sensors mostly rely on exercise to access sweat and are not suitable for daily at-home uses or for sedentary individuals, this project will develop the fully integrated microfluidic wearable system for autonomous sweat induction, efficient sweat sampling, and in situ multiplexed analysis across activities. Lastly, in vivo evaluation of the wearable senor will be performed in patients with long COVID for retrospective and prospective monitoring in post-COVID complications. The currently unavailable molecular information collected continuously by the wearable sweat biosensors could have a profound public health impact and greatly facilitate our fundamental understanding of the roles of circulating biomarkers in long COVID to reduce susceptibility to post-COVID complications.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.