Wireless wearable reader platform for continuous healthcare monitoring with power harvesting

Wearable and implantable healthcare monitoring devices have become essential in modern medicine due to their ability to provide reliable and real-time data on individuals' health status. These devices facilitate continuous monitoring, early intervention, and personalized care, leading to improved patient outcomes and reduced strain on healthcare systems. The advanced capabilities of wearable and implantable devices have made it possible to design and fabricate platforms that can simultaneously measure and report critical health-related metrics within the human body. In this thesis, we will demonstrate our proposed approaches and developed platforms for healthcare monitoring. As a first non-invasive wearable device, we developed a fully integrated sensing system capable of detecting low glucose concentrations, acquiring heartrate variability (HRV) data, and sensing temperature from human skin. The system can be easily attached to the skin, offering direct read-out and wireless signal transmission, with extended battery life through continuous RF-based charging. The platform can measure glucose concentration using a microfluidic sensory patch with an embedded screen-printed glucose sensor. Furthermore, the device uses a photoplethysmography module and temperature sensor to monitor HRV and temperature values and transmitting them to the user's smart devices. In another effort, we proposed and developed a wearable platform for continuous and simultaneous monitoring of the different biomarkers. We tested the device by measuring sodium, potassium, and pH levels in real-time and transmit them to the user's smart devices over Bluetooth. Moreover, this platform features the NFC power harvesting allowing for long-term monitoring by charging a rechargeable battery. The fabricated platform can be used as a minimally invasive health monitoring device by integrating hollow microneedles patch for interstitial fluid extraction. This approach provides further opportunities to acquire data from multiple biomarkers related to various diseases and diagnostics, offering a highly accurate approach to health monitoring. Taking this a step further, we proposed the design and fabrication of a standalone wireless system capable of capturing frequency shifts in fully passive implantable or wearable sensors. Our approach addresses invasive measurement issues by replacing traditional physical interconnections and power-hungry systems with a wireless signal reader and power harvesting platform. The device's power harvesting capability allows continuous long-term measurement without the need for frequent battery replacements. The fabricated wireless reader continuously measures and calculates frequency shifts induced on the passive sensor by the reader coil. This device can be used with various passive LCR sensors to continuously analyze critical health-related signals and biomarkers, making it a potential candidate for real-time physiological and clinical investigations as a next-generation wearable healthcare monitoring system.