Recently, the research team led by Sheng Yan from the Institute for Advanced Studies at Shenzhen University published their findings entitled “Self-Adhesive, Biocompatible, Wearable Microfluidics with Erasable Liquid Metal Plasmonic Hotspots for Glucose Detection in Sweat” in ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces. Qingwei Yuan, a master’s student at the Nanophotonics Research Center of Shenzhen University and Professor Hui Fang are the co-first authors of the paper, with Sheng Yan as the sole corresponding author. The Institute for Advanced Study at Shenzhen University is the first affiliation. This achievement was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation, the Guangdong Provincial Basic and Applied Basic Research Fund, and the Shenzhen Science and Technology Innovation Committee.

Sweat is a non-invasive metabolite that can provide clinically meaningful information about physical conditions without harming the body. Glucose, a vital component in sweat, is closely related to blood glucose levels, and changes in its concentration can reflect the health status of diabetics.Yan team developed a self-adhesive, wearable microfluidic device, which could detect changes of glucose concentration in human sweat with SERS technology in a non-invasive manner. The erasable plasmonic hotspots based on liquid metal made the chip reusable and has great application potential. All the key components (self-adhesive elastomer, direct-writing device, SERS substrate with erasable plasmonic hotspots) were obtained via simple, low-cost methods. In addition to glucose detection, this microfluidic chip with the erasable LM plasmonic hotspots also has great potential in non-invasive, real-time monitoring of other biomarkers in human sweat.

Link to the original article of the paper：

https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acsami.3c11746