Development of a Disposable, Paper-Based Blood Urea Sensor for Point-of-Care Health Monitoring

This work presents a single-use, disposable, paper sensor for blood urea measurement, directly from whole-blood sample. The sensor is compact, inexpensive and can be used even by an unskilled person. It is a part of a small, hand-held meter which adopts an impedimetric sensing technology using graphite electrodes. Here, the urea concentration of the blood is estimated in five different levels from the measured impedance of the whole-blood sample. Only, 0.2 mL of blood is required for each measurement and the response time is only 30 s. The look up table and pre-calibration are discussed here with detailed experimental results and analysis. The work also discusses the design of an electronic interface and an embodiment to clamp and hold the sensor in the measuring platform. The proposed prototype of blood-urea meter will provide a point-of-care diagnosis and monitoring for the house-held patient.