SBIR Phase I: Low-Cost and Sample-Efficient Micromachined Ultrasonic Sensor for Blood Coagulation Time Monitoring

The broader impact/commercial potential of this project is in enabling a novel and powerful diagnostic technique that could open the door to emergence of a new class of micro-scale ultrasonic characterization devices. The immediate impact of the project is in the field of biomedical sensors and aims at increasing the accessibility and affordability of health care for our aging population. Access to simple and accurate Point of Care devices such as those developed in this project can greatly drive down the cost of health care while ensuring a healthier society. This is especially important for the current time where the cost of healthcare is a becoming an increasing burden for families, government and healthcare industry. In addition, the technology developed in this project has potential to be modified for use in other industries, such as measuring viscosity of precious materials. If successful, the technology can be licensed for use in several other products to greatly increase its economic impact. This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project aims at studying the feasibility of utilizing a micro-scale ultrasonic liquid sensor for measuring the coagulation time of very small volumes of blood (less than 1µL). If successful, this innovative sensor technology will be the basis for an accurate and affordable Point of Care (POC) blood coagulation monitoring system. A need exists in the field of medical diagnostics for an electronic device able to measure blood coagulation, which is sufficiently inexpensive, reliable and convenient to use, and that permits points-of-care use by untrained individuals or health professionals in locations such as the home, medical emergency sites, and battlefields. These devices also need to operate with a sample sizes as small as practically possible. Micro-resonantsensors are a viable solution and offer many advantages such as quasi-digital outputs, simple electronics interface, small size, and high sensitivities. However, the application of such resonant sensors for measuring biofluids has been limited due to the inherent dampening of the resonant structurewhen operated in liquid environments such as blood. The proposed sensor in this proposal will achieve the ease of electronic interfacing while maintaining high performance when measuring viscose liquid properties.