Thin Film and Functionalized Micro-Structures for Health Monitoring

The fabrication of wearable electronic sensors and Lab on Chip technology for continuous health monitoring and biomedical diagnosis is still demanding for innovative, easy and low-cost fabrication technology. The interest in testing innovative system for the early detection of biomarkers in body fluids is growing both for the industry of personalized medicine on earth both for the employment as device of self-therapy for astronauts during space exploration. In fact, astronauts involved in low earth orbit missions (international space station- commercial stations), moon exploration and, in future, Mars missions could find great advantages in the use of point of care testing devices, noninvasive and easy to use. In this work we discuss about innovative technologies for the fabrication of thin-film and microstructures, such as micro-needles, that could be used for sampling the biomarker of interest from the interstitial body fluid. The technology proposed allows a closed loop process for the fabrication and characterization in real time of the structures of interest. We describe the functionalization of the microstructures for the biomedical diagnosis and their possible functionalization in terms of drug-delivery systems. The results proposed could be used to study the effects of space on the aging process (metabolic alterations, proinflammatory state), to test alternative solutions in controlling stress state and more in general to go into details of the effect of spaceflights on protein expression.