A wireless potentiostat for mobile chemical sensing and biosensing

Abstract

Wireless chemical sensors are used as analytical devices in homeland defence, home-based healthcare, food logistics and more generally for the Sensor Internet of Things (SIoT). Presented here is a battery-powered and highly portable credit-card size potentiostat that is suitable for performing mobile and wearable amperometric electrochemical measurements with seamless wireless data transfer to mobile computing devices. The mobile electrochemical analytical system has been evaluated in the laboratory with a model redox system – the reduction of hexacyanoferrate(III) – and also with commercially available enzymatic blood-glucose test-strips. The potentiostat communicates wirelessly with mobile devices such as tablets or Smartphones by near-field communication (NFC) or with personal computers by radio-frequency identification (RFID), and thus provides a solution to the ‘missing link’ in connectivity that often exists between low-cost mobile and wearable chemical sensors and ubiquitous mobile computing products. The mobile potentiostat has been evaluated in the laboratory with a set of proof-of-concept experiments, and its analytical performance compared with a commercial laboratory potentiostat (R2=0.9999). These first experimental results demonstrate the functionality of the wireless potentiostat and suggest that the device could be suitable for wearable and point-of-sample analytical measurements. We conclude that the wireless potentiostat could contribute significantly to the advancement of mobile chemical sensor research and adoption, in particular for wearable sensors in healthcare and sport physiology, for wound monitoring and in mobile point-of-sample diagnostics as well as more generally as a part of the Sensor Internet of Things.