Confined Smart Hydrogels for Applications in Chemomechanical Sensors for Physiological Monitoring

A “smart” hydrogel is a crosslinked polymer network that reversibly swells and absorbs water in response to an external stimulus such as change in pH or in the concentration of some analyte such as glucose. Microscopically-thin smart hydrogels can be combined with microfabricated piezoresistive pressure transducers to obtain “chemomechanical sensors” that serve as selective and versatile wireless biomedical sensors. Proof-of-concept is shown here using glucose- and pH-responsive hydrogels.