Simultaneous Monitoring of Anesthetics and Therapeutic Compounds with a Portable Multichannel Potentiostat

As metabolic pathways are highly variable among different patients, then an accurate and continuous monitoring of the personal response to drug treatments is essential especially with critical medications, e.g. anesthetic and anti-cancer cocktails. Currently, for anesthesia monitoring, there are no fully mature point-of-care bio-sensing systems. Indeed, it is still evaluated by mathematical models and with indirect parameters like Bispectral Index, which can not provide the actual concentration in blood. The aim of this paper is to investigate solutions for developing a portable system able to monitor simultaneously several different drugs. For this purpose, Cyclic Voltammetries with an anesthetic product and therapeutic compounds were performed for the validation of the system. A multichannel potentiostat has been realized with Off-The-Shelf Components (COTS). Then, results from electrochemical acquisitions on GC SPEs show that the proposed circuitry is suitable for this aim and they prove its high flexibility to develop portable systems for continuous monitoring of anesthetics and therapeutic compounds

Quasi-Digital Biosensor-Interface for a Portable Pen to Monitor Anaesthetics Delivery

Monitoring of patient response to the anaesthetic drugs is an attractive improvement for achieving a correct balance of sedation level, increasing the chance of success in the right procedure of anaesthesia. Nowadays, there are no commercial tools able to offer real-time monitoring of anaesthetics, indeed, there is still a lack in sensing technologies able to maintain high performances in long term monitoring within a portable miniaturised hardware system. To overcome these limitations, we are here presenting the innovative concept of a portable pen-device able to sense anaesthetic compounds over time. This study is based on an electrochemical sensor to be fully integrated into a complete pen-shaped point-of-care for the monitoringof anaesthesia delivery. The design of the system is based on a bio-inspired event-based approach that is guaranteeing low complexity, low power consumption and is therefore suitable to be scaled to fit the barrel of a pen. An exhaustive comparison between the proposed system and a lab instrument proves that the presented approach obtains comparable performances in terms of sensitivity and resolution with the ones obtained by expensive commercial instrumentation, meanwhile, the results show a 95 % power consumption reduction and a 92 % area decrease w.r.t. previously presented implementation

Optimized Sampling Rate for Voltammetry-Based Electrochemical Sensing in Wearable and IoT Applications

The recent advancements in electrochemical measurements are guiding the development of new platforms for in-situ point-of-care monitoring of human-metabolite, markers and drugs. Despite this, the application of Voltammetry-Based Sensing (VBS) techniques is still limited in wearable, portable, or IoT systems. In order to use VBS approaches to measure analytes in small and low-power electronic platforms for diagnostics, several improvements are required. For example, the definition of a method to achieve the right trade-off between sample rate and sensing performance is still missing. To develop a method to define the best sampling rate, we present here an extensive analysis of experimental data to prove that is feasible to detect drugs such as paracetamol by Staircase Cyclic Voltammetry (SCV) or Differential Pulse Voltammetry (DVP) direct detection methods, with low sampling frequency. Our results prove that the proposed method helps the development of systems capable of discriminating the minimum pharmacology concentration of the metabolite under analysis with a massive reduction of the sampling frequency

Paradigm-Shifting Players for IoT: Smart-Watches for Intensive Care Monitoring

Wearable devices, e.g. smart-watches, are gaining popularity in many fields and in wellness monitoring too. In this paper we propose an IoT application to alert the medical doctor assigned to a critical unit by using a smart-watch. The wearable device improves the efficacy of monitoring patients at risk in hospital units allowing the medical doctor to access information at any time and from any place. A network was built to wirelessly connect bio-sensing platforms, which measure metabolites concentration in patients’ fluids (e.g. blood), with a dedicated application running on the smart-watch. In case of anomalous measured values, incoming alert notifications are received to ask urgent medical intervention. The main advantage of this new approach is that the doctors, or in general the caregivers, can freely move in the hospital other structures and perform other tasks meanwhile simultaneously and constantly monitoring all the patients thanks to the technology on their wrist

Raspberry Pi Driven Flow-Injection System for Electrochemical Continuous Monitoring Platforms

Nowadays, there is an immense interest regarding new bio-sensing technologies, highlighting the need for effective validation of their capabilities. This necessity is more crucial when examining the proprieties of a sensor for continuous monitoring of a concentration trend in time, before in vivo implementations. In the framework of personalised medicine, it is imperative to introduce a robust way to parametrise the highly variable responses of human metabolism. We propose a novel solution for the design of an automatic flow-injection environment that validates continuous monitoring systems performances. The setup is also validated for reproducing a paracetamol concentration trend in buffer solution