Development Of Point-Of-Care Devices For Rapid Diagnostics And Preventive Care

Abstract

With the cost of healthcare in the U.S. predicted to reach 30% of the GDP by 2040, medical technology needs to help reduce the stress on physicians and facilitate personalized preventive care. The two most promising ways of achieving this are through developments in implantable devices for monitoring and treating patients outside of clinical settings and through better point-of-care diagnostics tools. The first part of this dissertation focuses on the development of a potentially implantable autonomous device for the prevention of late-phase hemorrhagic shock (HS), the leading cause of death for people with traumatic injuries. We demonstrate that such a device can continuously monitor vasopressin levels, an indicator of late-phase HS, and release vasopressin automatically when levels drop below a certain threshold in order to help stabilize the situation. We also discuss the possibility of using a nonenzymatic glucose fuel cell unit, instead of a lithium battery, in order to increase the implantable device's lifetime. Novel power sources are important in the development of low-power long-term implantable devices, and we propose several non-enzymatic fuel cells that can be used as coating layers on current implantable devices or as stand-alone power sources. We show that such glucose fuel cell can produce 16[MICRO SIGN]W cm-3 of power and can be integrated in implantable devices such as the one for preventing late-phase HS. In the second part of the dissertation, we discuss the development of a platform for colorimetric biomarker detection on a smartphone. This platform consists of a smartphone accessory that allows uniform and repeatable image acquisition of a colorimetric test strip and an app that analyzes parameters such as hue, saturation and luminosity of the test area, quantifies the biomarker levels and displays the value on the screen. We demonstrate its use in monitoring electrolyte loss, enamel decalcification, cholesterol and vitamin D. We envision this as the first step toward the development of the NutriPhone, a platform for vitamin and micronutrient testing on a smartphone.