Research Projects

The advancements in Indian society rely on on-body biomedical monitoring devices for personalized medicine, real-time, continuous, and out-of-clinic monitoring of individual health situations. Sweat, a body fluid secreted by eccrine glands under physical heat or emotional stress, can be used for non-invasive monitoring at out-of-clinic locations, benefiting the human health diagnostics sector. However, existing sweat-based wearable sensors face challenges such as ambient temperature and humidity variation, medication-based errors, and enzyme delamination and leaching. The lack of self-energy generation system in practical use-cases hinders the scale-up processes of these devices. This project aims to develop bi-functional catalysts equipped free-standing and flexible carbon aerogel-based electrochemical probes for the evolution of enzyme-free biofuel cells (BFCs) and improve the competency of sweat as a fuel in high-performance and durable BFCs. The practical applicability of BFCs in wearable electronic devices is hindered by fluctuations during the integration of single cells into the stack due to non-uniform distributions of potential, temperature, and reactant/product concentration. The project aims to address these challenges with a compact architecture of BFC stack and harvest maximum power performance without major performance loss from single cells to self-power the on-body biomedical monitoring device with an interdisciplinary approach.