UCLA

Point-of-care testing has greatly improved the accessibility of medical diagnostics and brought it from central laboratory closer to our daily life settings: hospitals, clinics, and pharmacies. The maturity and convergence of micro-device fabrication, sensing methodology development, and low power electronics technologies, in combination with the exponential expansion of internet of things infrastructure have provided an unprecedented opportunity to transform the accessibility of medical testing from the point-of-care to the point-of-person setting. Such transformation would create a paradigm shift in healthcare: moving away from reactive medicine to proactive medicine, which means instead of getting sick and then go to the doctor, the risk of developing disease will be calculated based on our daily measurements, informing timely and preventative actions. To realize point-of-person monitoring, the new generation of personal health monitoring systems should be: 1) portable, allowing for them to be easily distributed and embedded in our lives (e.g., in a wearable or mobile formats); 2) low cost and affordable by the general population; and 3) simple to operate, ideally eliminating the need for user intervention, for example, via automation of the underlying analytical operations. Moreover, the targeted bio-signal domain should be expanded from biophysical signals to biochemical signals to capture insightful health information related to different types of diseases at the molecular level.Aligned with this vision, this dissertation introduces new wearable and mobile bioanalytical systems that are uniquely positioned to support health monitoring at the point-of-person. The first section of this dissertation provides the background and an overview of the point-of-person health monitoring. The second section describes the biofluid-centered operations (e.g., sampling, management, processing, and sensing) that are essential for the realization of complete solutions for point-of-person biochemical monitoring (with the particular focus on wearable format). The third section demonstrates the mobile point-of-person biochemical platforms with specifics in different automated biofluid functionalities and biomarker detection. The final section discusses the remaining challenges and outlines the potential directions to be pursued in order to enable the large-scale deployment of biochemical health monitoring, and catalyze the transition from point-of-lab and point-of-care testing to point-of-person monitoring.