Research

Wearable Bioelectronics

The wearable health monitoring technologies and devices show great promise in clinical healthcare due to their ability to monitor physiological signals and to help maintain an optimal health status as well as assess the physical fitness of outpatients. Particularly, wearable biosensors aim to replace centralised hospital-based care systems with home-based personal diagnostics to reduce healthcare costs and time-to-diagnosis by providing real-time analysis. In this respect, wearable biosensors have recently emerged as an alternative to provide vital signs monitoring of patients, athletes, premature infants, children, psychiatric patients, people who need long-term care, and people in impassable regions far from health and medical services, and they are significantly effective in the prevention, timely diagnosis, control, and treatment of diseases.

Biosensors in Healthcare

The integration of nanomaterials as a bridge between the biological and electronic worlds has revolutionised understanding of how to generate functional bioelectronic devices and has opened up new horizons for the future of bioelectronics. The use of nanomaterials as a versatile interface in the area of bioelectronics offers many practical solutions and has recently emerged as a highly promising route to overcome technical challenges in the control and regulation of communication between biological and electronics systems. Hence, the interfacing of nanomaterials is yielding a broad platform of functional units for bioelectronic interfaces and is beginning to have a significant impact on many fields within the life sciences.

Our main focuses are

Bacterial sensing and biofilm monitoring
Hormone, metabolites and ion sensing

Stress Mechanisms and Diagnostics

Despite a serious impact, the current screening and diagnosis approach for stress are not well established. The current approach to measure an individual’s stress includes either self-reporting using a questionnaire or laboratory-based specific biomarker analysis based on blood and urine tests. However, these methods require a long and complicated analysis procedure, skilled personnel to analyze the results, and thus do not provide real-time information due to infrequent short measurement periods or lack of adequate health care access. These challenges make it difficult to ascertain if a significant health change has occured in a patient.

We investigate the fundamentals of human cortisol mechanisms and pathways in hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis and aims to develop different monitoring tools.

Switchable and Programmable
Bioelectronics

In parallel with advancements in the successful combination of the fields of biology and electronics using nanotechnology in a conventional way, a new branch of switchable bioelectronics, based on signal-responsive materials and related interfaces, has begun to emerge. Switchable bioelectronics consists of functional interfaces equipped with molecular cues that are able to mimic and adapt to their natural environment and change physical and chemical properties on demand. These switchable interfaces are essential tools to develop a range of technologies to understand the function and properties of biological systems such as bio-catalysis, control of ion transfer and molecular recognition used in bioelectronics systems.