Rutgers University-New Brunswick engineers have developed a wireless smart-wristband that connects to smartphones to monitor the wearer’s personal health and environment. This wristband could be added to other existing health monitoring wristbands and wearable devices. The new wristband monitors heart rate, physical activity and more.
A smart wristband with a wireless connection to smartphones. (Source: Abbas Furniturewalla)
"It's like a Fitbit but has a biosensor that can count particles, so that includes blood cells, bacteria and organic or inorganic particles in the air," said Mehdi Javanmard, senior author of the study and assistant professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering in the School of Engineering.
"Current wearables can measure only a handful of physical parameters such as heart rate and exercise activity," said Abbas Furniturewalla, study lead author and former undergraduate researcher in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. "The ability for a wearable device to monitor the counts of different cells in our bloodstream would take personal health monitoring to the next level."
The wristband is made of plastic with a flexible circuit board and biosensor with a channel (or pipe) that is thinner than the diameter of a human hair. There are gold electrodes embedded within the circuit board. The wristband can process electrical signals and the microcontroller digitizes the data to be sent to a smartphone. The Bluetooth module transmits the data wirelessly.
The wristband gathers blood samples through pinpricks. The blood is then fed through the channels and the wristband counts the blood cells to gather information about your health.
The data that the wristband gathers is sent wirelessly to any kind of smartphone, from Android to Apple. In an app, the health data is processed and then displayed for users or health professionals to access. For health professionals, the wristband allows them to get rapid blood test results without having to use expensive equipment or send the sample out of the office to a lab and waiting days for results.
"There's a whole range of diseases where blood cell counts are very important," Javanmard said. "Abnormally high or low white blood cell counts are indicators of certain cancers like leukemia, for example."
The wristband could also allow constant health data to be sent to physicians who need to monitor their patient’s health for a long period of time. The wristband could be used for biomedical and environmental applications too.
"This would be really important for settings with lots of air pollutants and people want to measure the amount of tiny particles or dust they're exposed to day in and day out," Javanmard said. "Miners, for example, could sample the environment they're in."
The paper on the new wristband was published in Microsystems and Nanoengineering.
