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Sensor100 June 2014
In which we bring you the more unusual or off-topic stories of the month
Prototype electrolyte sensor
provides immediate read-outs
“Painless wearable microneedle device may
reduce trips to doctors’ offices” says
San-
dia Labs.
There are seemingly an endless series of ad-
vances in wearable sensors which monitor
heart rate, motion, and sometimes other
parameters, but few of them actually meas-
ure bio and chemical markers.
Sensor100 has previously reported on a
wearable electrolyte sensor (Canadian Air
Force - Sensor100 May issue) and glucose
monitor (Imperial College - Sensors in
Medicine 2014). So when
Sandia Labs
announced that it was developing a sensor for potassium and other
components of interstitial fluids, we might have spotted a trend.
The Sandia Labs device features nine sampling needles, each only 800
millionths of a meter (microns) in height, and beneath them, a fluidic
channel that can draw interstitial fluid over nine gold disk electrodes.
Each disk can be tailored to detect a different analyte.
We are a long way from wearable sensors reliably monitoring bio-
chemical parameters but this space is worth watching.
The LastWord
Sandia National Laborato-
ries researcher Ronen Polsky
holds a prototype of a micro-
needle fluidic chip device able
to selectively detect and pain-
lessly measure electrolytes
in the
i
nterstitial fluids that
bathe skin cells
