Jim Watkins the Director of the National Science Foundation’s Center for Hierarchical Manufacturing (CHM) at the University of Massachusetts (UMass) Amherst, reports that the new Center for Personalized Health Monitoring (CPHM) will soon develop prototypes of wearable biosensors to monitor blood sugar or insulin levels remotely.
The newly launched CPHM is supported in part by a $95 million grant awarded from the Commonwealth’s Life Science Center along with long term support from the National Science Foundation.
“The first generation of these devices is coming out now, but we’re not there yet in terms of size, wearability efficiency of the data transmitted plus we need other important factors”, Watkins notes. “The small, light, and flexible smart devices will need to be relatively inexpensive to manufacture”.
CHM’s polymer scientists and engineers are working with a local company called FLEXcon of Spencer Massachusetts. The plan is to develop device layers for flexible electronics, medical sensors, bonding systems, and other applications that can turn out devices much more efficiently and at a lower cost than devices that are built on conventional assembly lines requiring expensive silicon wafers that must be handle multiple times in a vacuum or at very high temperatures.
The team is currently working on the cost versus capability curve to make the devices affordable. They are working with dozens of other companies in the state and nationally as well as with the military to develop portable and wearable devices at an affordable cost.
In another effort at UMass, researchers have developed accelerometers which are devices that can measure the amount and intensity of movement to users of smartphones. Patty Freedson, Chair of the Kinesiology Department within the School of Public Health and Statistician John Staudenmayer have been working primarily with an accelerometer manufactured by ActiGraph, a company that produces accelerometer hardware and data management software.
The team has joined forces with the UMass Medical School to study physical activity and sedentary behavior in patients with osteoarthritis. Patients in the study wear an accelerometer sensor that differentiates postural positions.
With funding through the UMass Center for Clinical Translational Science Moment Fund, the device quantifies how much sitting, standing, and stepping osteoarthritis patients actually do and how these behaviors change during the progression of the disease.
In another funded project, the team has been testing and validating sensors that estimate breathing volume. Besides monitoring and assess physical activity, there is interest in the devices for other applications, such as studying environmental exposure. Air pollution is of concern particularly in urban areas, and scientists would like to develop a wearable device that could allow environmental health researchers to quantify internal exposure to air pollutants.