On Textiles Microfluidic Organic Biosensing via Additive Manufacturing

Recent advances in personalized healthcare show a tendency to use biochemical sensing platforms built on wearable substrates to continuously monitor the presence and concentration of key metabolites in sweat. The seamless integration of sensors with microfluidic components defines the scope for the manufacture of future wearable point-of-care devices. The adjustable wicking properties of textiles and their fibril structure naturally allow for the absorption, diffusion, and storage of sweat. We present a scalable additive technique for a textile-based skin-mounted microfluidics development on clothes. Our new method allows the patterning of hydrophobic regions in non-woven fabrics, creating boundaries of hydrophilic micro-channels. Along these channels, a capillary flow allows a directed collection of sweat from the skin to the sensing receptor using only the wicking properties of the fabric. Digital printing techniques provide a direct method for high resolution and reproducible deposition of flexible materials. On this basis, we have fabricated microfluidic modules with different architectures for the collection, storage, and analysis of sweat. Directly printing an organic bioelectronic sensor onto microfluidics allows a unique integration strategy for a low-cost fabric-based sweat detection platform. The method presented here demonstrates a new approach for the monolithic integration of bioelectronic devices with sweat collection and analysis capability in textile garments.