This innovation, has brought down the trouble of going for a needle prick or a urine sampling daily, for the patient. The device they have worked on is an easily wearable mouth guard that fits between the set of teeth. The instrumented mouth guard has a twist though – a novel wireless Bluetooth-enabled, biosensor chip which can precisely measure the levels of uric acid in human saliva. Yes, that’s right – Saliva! It can carry a huge amount of information on states of various diseases in a human body. Based on this fact, the scientists have embedded uricase enzyme-modified screen printed electrode in the mouth guard device that can track the salivary uric acid (SUA) levels and transmit the data to other devices for analysis and storage. On-the-go processing, interpretation, and storage of the data will be easier with this device as it can transmit the collected information via Bluetooth to laptops, smartphones, and other electronic gadgets.
The all-in-one prototype of wearable monitoring mouth guard has an in-built set of Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) transceiver, microcontroller, and a battery. So, this chip is capable of wireless transmission of the captured SUA data requiring no external power sources. This amazing real-time biosensor system was tested to its limits of high sensitivity, stability, and selectivity towards the biological information (here, uric acid) in a group of study participants. Saliva samples from healthy volunteers were compared to those of hyperuricemic patients, and further with those from the patients treated with Allopurinol drug (Allopurinol is used to treat high uric acid condition). The sensor could successfully decipher the differences between the values and also could detect the gradual dropping of uric acid levels in saliva, while the drug acted.
Salient features of the invented wearable biosensor system are:
- Real time monitoring of human salivary uric acid with integrated wireless biosensor in a smart mouth guard platform.
- Uses Bluetooth 4.0 wireless link technology for faster & wireless data transmission.
- Electrochemical detection of SUA through this bio-sensing platform can be achieved using any of the modified system using Prussian Blue pigment / Uricase enzyme / Glutarldehyde / Poly-ortrophenylendiamine.
- This technology can be equipped to track in real-time, several other bio-markers in human saliva viz., salivary amylase, lactate, salivary cortisol etc. through this convenient wearable health-care monitoring platform.
- The technology, once approved after all risk-benefit assessment, can prove to be a low-cost continuous health monitoring system in diverse medical applications.
Reference: http://www.jacobsschool.ucsd.edu/news/news_releases/release.sfe?id=1806
