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#Wearable vapor sensor can smell diabetes University of Michigan rightoriginal Studyposted by Catharine June-U. Michigan on August 6 2014. A wearable vapor sensor could monitor diseases such as diabetes and hypertension by picking up airborne biomarkers exhaled or released through the skin. ach of these diseases has its own biomarkers that the device would be able to sensesays Sherman Fan professor of biomedical engineering at University of Michigan . or diabetes acetone is a marker for example. ther biomarkers it could detect include nitric oxide and oxygen abnormal levels of which can point to conditions such as high blood pressure anemia or lung disease. Fan is developing the sensor with Zhaohui Zhong an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering and Girish Kulkarni a doctoral candidate in electrical engineering. The device is faster smaller and more reliable than its counterparts which today are too big to wear. Beyond disease monitoring the sensor has other applications. It would be able to register the presence of hazardous chemical leaks in a lab or elsewhere or provide data about air quality. ith our platform technology we can measure a variety of chemicals at the same time or modify the device to target specific chemicals. There are limitless possibilitieszhong says. To create their technology the researchers took a unique approach to detecting molecules. anoelectronic sensors typically depend on detecting charge transfer between the sensor and a molecule in air or in solutionkulkarni says. However these previous techniques typically led to strong bonds between the molecules being detected and the sensor itself. That binding leads to slow detection rates. nstead of detecting molecular charge we use a technique called heterodyne mixing in which we look at the interaction between the dipoles associated with these molecules and the nanosensor at high frequencieskulkarni says. This technique made possible through the use of graphene results in extremely fast response times of tenths of a second as opposed to the tens or hundreds of seconds typical in existing technology. It also dramatically increases the device's sensitivity. The sensor can detect molecules in sample sizes at a ratio of several parts per billion. These nanoelectronic graphene vapor sensors can be embedded completely in a microgas chromatography system which is the gold standard for vapor analysis the researchers say. The entire microgas chromatography system can be integrated on a single chip with low power operation and embedded in a badge-sized device that can be worn on the body to provide noninvasive and continuous monitoring of specific health conditions. e believe this device can be extremely beneficial to societyfan says. The researchers are working with the National Science Foundation s Innovation Corps program to move the device from the lab to the marketplace. Source: University of Michiganyou are free to share this article under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noderivs 3. 0 Unported license e

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