Flexible and superwettable bands as a platform toward sweat sampling and sensing

Abstract

Wearable biosensors as a user-friendly measurement platform have become a rapidly growing field of interests due to their possibility in integrating traditional medical diagnostics and healthcare management into miniature lab-on-body analytic devices. This paper demonstrates a flexible and skin-mounted band that combines superhydrophobic-superhydrophilic microarrays with nanodendritic colorimetric biosensors toward in situ sweat sampling and analysis. Particularly, on the superwettable bands, the superhydrophobic background could confine microdroplets into superhydrophilic microwells. On-body investigations further reveal that the secreted sweat is repelled by the superhydrophobic silica coating and precisely collected and sampled onto the superhydrophilic micropatterns with negligible lateral spreading, which provides an independent “vessel” toward cellphone-based sweat biodetection (pH, chloride, glucose and calcium). Such wearable, superwettable band-based biosensors with improved interface controllability could significantly enhance epidemical sweat sampling in well-defined sites, holding a great promise for facile and noninvasive biofluids analysis.