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Abstract
Smart hydrogels are a versatile class of materials that are attractive for biomedical sensor applications due to their potential biocompatibility and stimuli-responsiveness. However, the integration of these hydrogels into sensors requires development and engineering efforts on optimizing the volume phase transition and time response for the respective sensing applications. This work presents an optical evaluation platform for investigating hydrogel swelling properties in a liquid environment with automated flow control. It employs hydrogel features integrated in microfluidic test strips which are easily interchangeable. The evaluation is performed using an image sensor that records multiple miniaturized hydrogels in parallel. The overall performance is demonstrated for various hydrogel compositions and four different environmental stimuli including glucose concentration changes in serum and blood, which potentially enables pathways for this sensing platform to be used for point-of-care applications.
Supplementary materials
Title
Optical Imaging of Microfluidic Integrated Smart Hydrogels for Research and Sensing Applications
Description
This section contains additional information for material selection for microfluidic channel design, hydrogel preparation, performance evaluation for the image processing algorithm, response of multiple glucose-responsive hydrogel disks in a channel to various glucose concentrations, time resolved salt and temperature response of dual-responsive hydrogel disks, reliability of the optical platform, and long-term studies.
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