[Wearable chemical sensors for non-invasive monitoring]

Non-invasive and non-restrictive bioinstrumentation is strongly requested in the field of medical and health care technologies, being under rapid advance in informatization. Applying "Soft-MEMS" techniques onto functional polymers, flexible chemical sensors were developed. This sort of sensors is one of the promising candidates that realize the requirements. Wearable oxygen sensor was first introduced and applied to transcutaneous monitoring of partial pressure of arterial oxygen. Then, wearable glucose sensors, which were constructed by immobilizing glucose oxidase onto the sensing region of a wearable oxygen sensor were reported. Considering the progress towards contact lens type sensor in mind, optical-transparent was developed. On the other hand, biocompatible polymer was introduced. Both sensors were enough sensitive to measure glucose concentration in tear fluids (0.14 mmol/l). In this paper, recent researches on wearable oxygen sensors, wearable glucose sensors and their applications are reported.