Available student project - Developing wearable sensors for personalized health care technologies and solutions

Research fields

Wearable sensors for personalized health care

Project details

This is a multidisciplinary project supported by the ANU Grand Challenge project ‘Our Health in Our Hands’ (OHIOH), aimed at developing wearable sensors for detecting target biomarkers to identify certain health conditions. The project is intended to bring innovative sensing technologies with higher sensitivity and selectivity towards target biomarkers while exploring the avenues to miniaturize the sensor for point of care use. Multiple research directions are explored in this project in parallel that involves metasurfaces, nanopores and nanowire light emitting diodes (LEDs): 1) Different nanostructured dielectric surfaces called metasufaces are designed to manipulate the optical properties of the incident light. These metasurfaces are fabricated and tested as high sensitivity optical biosensors (Buddini Karawdeniya and Dragomir Neshev); 2) Nanopore arrays and single nanopores are fabricated on materials like silicon nitride, silicon oxide, single layer graphene etc. for resistive pulse sensing and more (Buddini Karawdeniya and Patrick Kluth); 3) Nanowires are designed and fabricated as highly sensitive breath sensors, to detect acetone and other gaseous biomarkers in exhaled breath, and miniaturized nanowire LEDs. Nanowire LEDs permit the miniaturization of larger optical detection systems aimed towards the development of wearable sensing technologies (Buddini Karawdeniya and Lan Fu). The sensors will be developed and tested in collaboration with engineers, chemists and medical researchers within the ANU OHIOH team to test biomarkers for diabetes and multiple sclerosis.

Required background

Interested in biosensing, photonics, nanotechnology and material science.

Project suitability

This research project can be tailored to suit students of the following type(s)

Contact supervisor

Karawdeniya, Buddini profile

Other supervisor(s)

Neshev, Dragomir profile
Kluth, Patrick profile
Fu, Lan profile