The Era of Digital Health: A Review of Portable and Wearable Affinity Biosensors

Abstract

Digital health facilitated by wearable/portable electronics and big data analytics holds great potential in empowering patients with real‐time diagnostics tools and information. The detection of a majority of biomarkers at trace levels in body fluids using mobile health (mHealth) devices requires bioaffinity sensors that rely on “bioreceptors” for specific recognition. Portable point‐of‐care testing (POCT) bioaffinity sensors have demonstrated their broad utility for diverse applications ranging from health monitoring to disease diagnosis and management. In addition, flexible and stretchable electronics‐enabled wearable platforms have emerged in the past decade as an interesting approach in the ambulatory collection of real‐time data. Herein, the technological advancements of mHealth bioaffinity sensors evolved from laboratory assays to portable POCT devices, and to wearable electronics, are synthesized. The involved recognition events in the mHealth affinity biosensors enabled by bioreceptors (e.g., antibodies, DNAs, aptamers, and molecularly imprinted polymers) are discussed along with their transduction mechanisms (e.g., electrochemical and optical) and system‐level integration technologies. Finally, an outlook of the field is provided and key technological bottlenecks to overcome identified, in order to achieve a new sensing paradigm in wearable bioaffinity platforms.

Emerging diagnostic tools for detection of COVID-19 and perspective

“…Point-of-care based biosensors are reported to have high selectivity and sensitivity and works on bio affinity receptors (Morales-Narváez and Dincer 2020 ). All kinds of biomolecules like aptamers, antibody nucleic acid and lipids are reported to be detected by making use of biosensors (Tu et al 2019 ). TriSilix is a recent advancement in the field of detection which makes use of silicon and have three modes of working on a single chip starting from electrical heater followed by temperature sensor and lastly electrochemical sensor when tested using cDNA from SARS-Cov-2 the system could detected up to 1 pg (Nunez-Bajo et al 2020 ).…”

Beyond Sensitive and Selective Electrochemical Biosensors: Towards Continuous, Real-Time, Antibiofouling and Calibration-Free Devices

“…However, it is worth noting that many of these biosensors have additional features with great practical relevance. The important advances provided by wearable devices for real-time electrochemical biosensing have been extensively reviewed in the last few years [ 14 , 15 , 16 , 17 , 18 , 19 ] and are not discussed in this article.…”

Development Perspective of Bioelectrocatalysis-Based Biosensors

“…Status of the human health is often evaluated on the basis of the balance of the compositions of the body fluid. Therefore, the multianalyte sensing and monitoring of biologic samples, that is, big data in human health attracted attention [ 105 , 106 , 107 ]. Similarly, multianalyte detection in environmental samples is also an important subject [ 108 ].…”