Small chemical sensorsGE Global Research to develop wearable RFID chemical sensor
GE Global Research will develop a wearable radio-frequency-identification (RFID) sensors to alert people to the presence of chemicals in the air; as the sensors can be made at a size smaller than a penny, they could form part of an identification badge that would provide an early warning for people about the presence of chemical agents
Researchers at GE Global Research has been awarded $2 million from the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) — part of the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) — to develop wearable radio-frequency-identification (RFID) sensors to alert people to the presence of chemicals in the air.
As the sensors can be made at a size smaller than a penny, they could form part of an identification badge that would provide an early warning for people about the presence of chemical agents. Detecting chemicals in this way could provide information about the relationship between a person’s health and the environment in which he or she lives.
Radislav Potyrailo, a principal scientist at GE Global Research who is leading the wearable RFID sensor project, said that the sensors could also be readily adapted to other applications.
Breath analysis is an area being extensively studied by many in both the sensing and medical communities and GE’s sensor could serve as an early-warning sign for diseases by identifying the volatile biomarkers associated with different types of diseases such as diabetes, lung diseases and metabolic disorders. “Simply breathing on the sensor could potentially pick up biomarkers that serve as an early signal to the presence of certain diseases such as diabetes or cancer and metabolic disorders,” said Potyrailo.
The sensor system being developed as part of the NIEHS project will employ a novel sensing approach that uses resonant antenna structures coated with various sensing films. This sensing approach will provide the selective quantitation of volatile organic compounds and chemical agents with part-per-billion detection limits in the presence of uncontrolled variations of ambient humidity.
