Laser-induced graphene sensors made inexpensive with stencil masking – Uplaza

Researchers on the College of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa have unveiled a brand new method that would make the manufacture of wearable well being sensors extra accessible and inexpensive.

Wearable sensors are essential in constantly monitoring important indicators and different well being indicators, offering real-time well being insights that allow proactive and personalised medical care. Nonetheless, producing these gadgets usually requires specialised amenities and technical experience, limiting their accessibility and widespread adoption.

The staff, led by Assistant Professor Tyler Ray within the Division of Mechanical Engineering (School of Engineering) and Division of Cell and Molecular Biology (John A. Burns College of Drugs), launched a low-cost, stencil-based methodology for producing sensors constituted of laser-induced graphene (LIG), a key materials utilized in wearable sensing platforms.

“This advancement allows us to create high-performance wearable sensors with greater precision and at a lower cost,” mentioned Ray. “By using a simple metal stencil during the laser patterning process, we’ve overcome a key limitation of the traditional fabrication process, which opens up new possibilities for sensor design and functionality.”

By using commercially obtainable metallic stencils, the UH Mānoa staff was capable of scale back the minimal function dimension from about 120 micrometers to only 45 micrometers. This permits for the creation of extra advanced sensor designs, corresponding to fine-line microarray electrodes, which had been beforehand troublesome to attain with customary laser processing.

“We demonstrated the practicality of our method by fabricating temperature sensors and multi-electrode electrochemical sensors,” Ray defined. “These devices exhibited enhanced performance, which we attribute to the improved resolution and quality of the graphene patterns.”

The research was revealed in Biosensors and Bioelectronics as a part of the journal’s spotlight sequence “Young Scientists in the Americas.”

The lead writer of the research was Kaylee M. Clark, with co-authors Deylen T. Nekoba and Kian Laʻi Viernes from the Division of Mechanical Engineering, and Jie Zhou from the Division of Electrical and Laptop Engineering.

This innovation builds upon Ray’s earlier work on the “sweatainer,” a 3D-printed wearable sweat sensor that collects and analyzes sweat to offer insights into varied well being circumstances corresponding to dehydration, fatigue, and critical sicknesses like diabetes.

The s-LIG methodology additional enhances the potential for accessible well being monitoring applied sciences by enabling scalable fabrication of high-performance sensors with out reliance on conventional, resource-intensive fabrication pathways.