Wearable biosensors and sample handling strategies

Abstract One of the most recent and important breakthroughs in the field of biosensor technology is the wearable biosensor. The wearable biosensor has attracted considerable attention because of its potential to change classical medical diagnostics and continuous health monitoring concepts. Wearable biosensor applications aim to change centralized hospital-based care system to home-based personal medicine and reduce healthcare cost and time for diagnosis. The understanding of traditional healthcare diagnosis and related tools has started to evolve through an easy-to-use, and decentralized diagnosis perspective that offers concepts and devices including miniaturized, wearable, and implantable biosensors. However, achieving these paradigm shifts requires significant progress and research of new materials, interfaces, circuit designs, data processing, and business models. In this chapter, we aim to survey the recent trends of wearable biosensor technology and their implications for health applications. In the first section, we seek to piece together different types of wearable biosensors, highlight, and discuss early breakthroughs, key developments, and future of point-of-care diagnostics. In the second section, we highlight sample handling strategies for various wearable biosensors. Each section concludes with a discussion of prominent examples in corresponding branches and their implications.