Stanford Medicine and Intermountain Healthcare to collaborate

A team of researchers has combined two separate technologies to create a health-monitoring device that is noninvasive, doesn’t interfere with strenuous outdoor activities and can continuously track a user’s health at the molecular level. The two-part system of flexible sensors and a flexible circuit board sticks to the skin and then detects and analyzes a profile of chemicals in sweat. The device is described in a paper published online Jan. 27 in Nature. The project, led by senior author Ali Javey, PhD, professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences at the University of CaliforniaBerkeley, is a collaboration with researchers at the Stanford School of Medicine. “This wearable device provides more information than the currently commercialized wearable sensors. It provides insight about an individual’s physiological state at molecular levels,” said Sam Emaminejad, PhD, a joint postdoctoral scholar at Stanford and at UCBerkeley, who is the co-lead author with UC-Berkeley postdoctoral scholar Wei Gao, PhD. Other noninvasive sweat biosensors either monitor only a single molecule at a time or lack signal processing that can adjust for temperature effects or interactions among different molecules. The new device, tested on a team of sweaty volunteers, is a fully-integrated “perspiration analysis system” that binds to the skin and measures certain sweat metabolites and electrolytes, and can calibrate its readings based on skin temperature. In the future, this kind of wearable biosensor could be able to alert athletes and patients to fatigue, dehydration, overheating and other health problems. Emaminejad said that when he first came to Stanford several years ago, he wanted to earn a doctorate in electrical engineering and to work with renowned scientist Ron Davis, PhD, professor of biochemistry and of genetics and director of the Stanford Genome Technology Center. Over a 50-year career, Davis has been the originator, with others, of a series of disruptive technologies, such as a way to map RNA, a technique for splicing fragments of DNA together, the first DNA microarray for profiling the expression of genes and a method for mapping genes ww.Bill iPhOtOs.COm / shut t erst OCk .CO m Child life specialists help young patients understand medical procedures, deal with fears and even have fun.