Tooth-mounted sensor can detect food content
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- Published: Wednesday, 28 March 2018 07:48
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A tooth-mounted food sensor could wirelessly transmit radio frequency data about the foods you’re eating, reporting on sugar, salt, and alcohol in real-time. The creators, led by biomedical engineer Fiorenzo Omenetto of Tufts University, hope that the device will someday help consumers and researchers make “conclusive links between dietary intake and health.”
The sensor can be attached to a tooth and will track how much glucose, salt, or alcohol you eat and will wirelessly send the reading to your smartphone. Omenetto’s team has long been working on such radio frequency sensors—ones for the skin, brain, and surgical implants. “It made sense to move to the mouth”, Omenetto said.
The 2mm x 2mm prototypes to do that use their three-layer sensor design. It involves a middle layer of bio-responsive material, sandwiched between two gold, split-ring resonators. The bio-responsive layers in the prototypes were either a silk film or a hydrogel. The silk film can contain things like enzymes or antibodies to detect specific molecules. In doing so, it changes the chemical conditions between the resonators.
The resonators act like antennas, picking up and transmitting ambient radio frequencies. In early tests, the researchers used a portable radio frequency analyzer attached to a tablet or mobile phone to monitor the frequencies. Those frequencies change depending on what’s going on with the bio-responsive layer of the sensor. “It’s a passive device,” Omenetto explains. “And you’re pinging it with your phone, essentially. We’re pretty far away from having the app that tells you, ‘You have consumed 216.3 calories today,’but it’s really not implausible to think that you can get there tomorrow.”
The developers report their prototype in a study that will be published soon in the journal Advanced Materials.
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