An Intra-Oral Optical Sensor for the Real-Time Identification and Assessment of Wine Intake.

Faragó Faragó,Hintea Hintea,Feurdean Feurdean,Ilea Ilea,Gălătuș Gălătuș,Boșca Boșca

doi:10.3390/s19214719

Abstract

Saliva has gained considerable attention as a diagnostics alternative to blood analyses. A wide spectrum of salivary compounds is correlated to blood concentrations of biomarkers, providing informative and discriminative data regarding the state of health. Intra-oral detection and assessment of food and beverage intake can be correlated and provides valuable information to forecast the formation and modification of salivary biomarkers. In this context, the present work proposes a novel intra-oral optical fiber sensor, developed around an optical coupler topology, and exemplified on the detection and assessment of wine intake, which is accounted for example for the formation of Nε-carboxymethyllysine Advanced Glycation End-products. A laboratory proof of concept validates the proposed solution on four white and four red wine samples. The novel optical sensor geometry shows good spectral properties, accounting for selectivity with respect to grape-based soft drinks. This enables intra-oral detection and objective quality assessment of wine. Moreover, its implementation exploits the advantages of fiber-optics sensing and facilitates integration into a mouthguard, holding considerable potential for real-time biomedical applications to investigate Advanced Glycation End-products in the saliva and their connection with consumption of wine, for the evaluation of risk factors in diet-related diseases.

Highlights

Clinical diagnosis is commonly based on invasive procedures for the determination of disease-signaling blood biomarkers
The spectral attenuation of the point intra-oral sensor is expressed in terms of the T-coupler insertion loss, coupling ratio, and excess loss
The wine absorption spectra acquired with the proposed sensor exhibit a resolution fine enough, in both wavelength and amplitude domains, to express the measures of wine colors defined in terms of intensity, chromaticity, and brightness

Summary

Introduction

Clinical diagnosis is commonly based on invasive procedures for the determination of disease-signaling blood biomarkers. Blood biomarkers are considered to be the most relevant in the diagnostics procedure [1], the research community targets to investigate the collection of biomarkers from alternative body fluids: sweat, saliva, tears, etc. A wide spectrum of compounds present in the salivary fluid has been proven as highly informative and discriminatory, and could be considered as targeted analytes for intra-oral sensors in order to investigate the oral and general health status of Sensors 2019, 19, 4719; doi:10.3390/s19214719 www.mdpi.com/journal/sensors. Saliva analysis enables a painless diagnostic alternative to accurately reflect the healthy vs diseased state conditions in humans, useful for people with nervousness concerning the collection of blood samples or for those who require frequent clinical monitoring with multiple sampling in a relatively narrow time interval, e.g., every hour, multiple times per day, etc

Objectives

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion