Integrated biosensing system of electrochemistry and electrophysiology for cortisol and skin conductance analysis on smartphone

Abstract

High level of mental stress will lead to negative psychological and health consequences, such as insomnia, depression, and cardiovascular disease, which will increase the suicide rate and affect social stability. Mental stress has been proved to be related to biomarkers cortisol and skin conductance, and reflects the complementary advantages of stress monitoring. Based on electrochemistry and electrophysiology analysis technology, combined with microelectronic design and biosensors, this paper constructed an integrated physiological and biochemical sensing system, and an intelligent user interaction system. Firstly, a molecularly imprinted biosensor with gold nanoparticles (AuNPs), prussian blue (PB), and polypyrrole (PPy), achieved highly sensitive detection of cortisol in the range of 1–10000 ng/mL and demonstrating good specificity. The cortisol detection unit used differential pulse voltammetry (DPV) method by dual power amplifier chip AD8674, which was a precision operational amplifier with low noise, low input bias current, and unit gain stability. Then, the skin conductance detection unit was mainly composed of a pulse width modulation (PWM) drive circuit, which was designed to achieve a 100 Hz voltage output. The integrated system was designed with microcontroller module, transimpedance amplifier (TIA) module, power management module, signal transmission module, cortisol and skin conductance detection module, which was suitable for constructing precision voltage control and weak current signal conditioning. Finally, based on the software and hardware platform of smartphones, an intelligent analysis system was developed to improve the portability and user interaction convenience. Our system achieved the physiological and biochemical joint detection for the first time, showing enormous application potential in future multimode sensing monitoring.