Conventional healthcare and the practice of medicine largely relies on the ineffective concept of one size fits all. Personalized medicine is an emerging therapeutic approach that aims to develop an advanced therapeutic technique that provides tailor-made therapy based on every individuals’ needs by delivering the right drug at the right time with the right amount of dosage. The advancement in technologies such as flexible electronics, microfluidics, biosensors, and advanced artificial intelligence can enable the realization of a truly effective personalized therapy. However, currently, there is a lack for a personalized minimally-invasive wearable closed-loop drug delivery system that is continuous, automated, conformal to the skin and cost-effective. Thus, this thesis focuses on the design, fabrication, optimization, and application of an automated personalized microfluidics drug delivery platform augmented with flexible biosensors, heaters, and expandable polymeric actuator. The platform provides precise drug delivery with spatiotemporal control over the administered dose as a response to real-time physiological changes of the individual. The system is flexible enough to be conformal to the skin and drug is transdermally administered through biocompatible microneedles. The platform includes a flexible multi-reservoir microfluidics layer, flexible and conformal heating elements, skin sensors and processing units which are powered by a lightweight battery integrated into the platform. The developed platform was fabricated using rapid, cost-effective techniques that are independent of advanced microfabrication facilities to expand its applications to low-resource setting and environments.
Date of Award | May 2019 |
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Original language | English (US) |
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Awarding Institution | - Computer, Electrical and Mathematical Sciences and Engineering
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Supervisor | Muhammad Mustafa Hussain (Supervisor) |
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- Personalized healthcare
- Wearable
- Sensors
- Actuators
- Microfluidics