Towards a Fully-Printed and Paper-Based Glucose Biosensor to Detect Urine-Glucose Levels in Neonates
Most often, hospital-used apnoea monitors create an un
comfortable and invasive experience for many new-borns. These machines are relatively expensive and are therefore not accessible or available to all of the public healthcare providers throughout South Africa. Another problem is that glucometers, implemented towards the glucose monitoring of neonates, make use of blood droplets sampled from the heel of new-borns. For these point-of-care devices, blood droplets need to be collected manually and sample collection is not only uncomfortable but done irregularly making these device implementations less reliable in terms of immediate and effective glucose monitoring.
In order to provide a simple health monitoring solution that is inexpensive and accessible to most the aim of my research is towards designing a fully inkjet-printed electrochemical glucose biosensor. This sensor solution combines electrochemical methods with enzyme affinitive reactions to measure the glucose levels in neonatal urine samples.